The Web is Toast

Here’s something people don’t want to talk about, but I have wanted to get off my chest for a while: The web is toast. Cold, burnt toast.

There’s a lot of noise about how LLMs are killing search, but that’s a narrow view that ignores the bigger picture. Google isn’t just worried about LLMs disrupting search. It’s worried about them undermining the entire web, and with it, the ad-fuelled ecosystem it depends on. That’s the real threat. And it’s starting to look inevitable.

The web has faced existential threats before. Apple’s app economy successfully shifted a huge chunk of user attention away from the open web into walled gardens. Meanwhile, governments are chipping away at the first two Ws of WWW with national firewalls and rising censorship. Now LLMs open a third front –  one that’s evolving faster and cuts deeper.

We’re witnessing a fundamental change in how users interact with information.

Users aren’t browsing, they’re asking. Traditional search returned links and said, “Here’s where to find the answer.” But LLMs skip that step. They ingest the content, synthesise the answer, and deliver it straight back to the user. The website, in this exchange, exists only to feed the machine, not the human and it’s easy to see the appeal:

The new paradigm isn’t perfect, but it’s easier. And ease wins, every time. The strange part is how human the machinery still looks.

We’re building tools to help LLMs browse websites like humans: Clicking, scrolling, parsing layouts not because it’s efficient, but because that’s how the infrastructure is built. It’s like programming a robot to move a mouse and click a button, when it could just issue the command directly. A backwards, theatrical way of preserving the illusion that humans are still central.

That won’t last. As LLMs improve at structured ingestion, and as businesses begin exposing content through APIs, structured data, and machine-readable endpoints, the fiction collapses. Websites stop being destinations. They become data sources.

Where we once optimised for users and search engines, we’ll now optimise for machines that never visit, but expect structured content they can digest, repackage, and serve on demand.

This shift also breaks the business model that’s funded the web. If no one’s clicking through, who’s seeing the ads? Who’s landing on the blog post, the guide, the product page? Already, many publishers are reporting huge traffic drops; not because content is worse, but because LLMs answer before the user ever gets to the link.

The ad-supported web may no longer be financially viable for much of its long-tail content. If websites are just raw material for language models, the money shifts away from content creation and towards those who control the models and the data pipelines.

Control becomes the next battleground.

Publishers and platforms will push back on open scraping. Data deals, paywalls, and proprietary APIs will emerge. Open content becomes closed input. The web, once a decentralised and messy ecosystem, starts to become something more like infrastructure: privately maintained, selectively exposed.

Meanwhile, businesses already sense the shift. Many consumer brands now launch only on TikTok or Instagram, with a “proper website” seen as an afterthought – useful for margin on repeat purchases, not for discovery or engagement.

Marketing? That changes too.

Most websites still assume a funnel: homepage → category → product → conversion. That model doesn’t hold if the user never visits. In a world where the journey starts and ends in an AI interface, there is no funnel. Just a prompt that you don’t control.

This isn’t doom and gloom…  it’s adaptation.

Marketing has always been about going where the audience is. Before the web, we still marketed. We’ll keep doing it after. For agencies, this shift might actually open up new opportunities – especially for those who move fast.

Brand and design might feel most under threat, but don’t forget we’re viewing this through the narrow lens of today’s text-heavy interfaces. Multi-modal AI is already here, and as it becomes native to more platforms, brand experience will resurface in new ways.

Yes, it’s a big shift. And yes, it’s more unsettling for those who earned their stripes during Google’s long, stable dominance than for those with longer memories. But that’s how it goes. BBS, Usenet, public FTP servers they had their time too (and yes… some of us old farts used them all as marketing tools!).

If the web does dwindle, it won’t be the end of digital marketing. It’ll just be another chapter. And for those willing to adapt, a chapter full of new opportunity.