Okay, denial phase is officially over, folks. What publishers, creators, and pretty much anyone with a website have been yelling for months is finally breaking through the corporate spin.
And the best part? It’s not some X randos this time—it’s coming from the actual execs who swore everything was smooth and fine.
Spoiler alert: it’s very much not fine. In-fact, AI is breaking the internet in more ways than we realize.
First up: Google, for months has been all sunshine and rainbows, insisting the web is thriving, clicks are “stable,” and search is still the great traffic firehose it’s always been. Sundar said it. Liz Reid said it. Nick Fox said it, heck the whole choir sang the same tune.
But then — plot twist. In a DOJ courtroom battle (y’know, the one that could chop up Google’s ad empire), the company finally admitted that “The open web is already in rapid decline.”
Their argument? If the government forces a breakup, it’ll speed up that decline and hurt publishers even more.
Now, of course, Google tried to walk it back: saying the line was taken out of context. But hey, the slip’s out in the open— traffic’s tanking, AI summaries are hogging the clicks, and the supposedly “thriving” web is bleeding out.
Meanwhile, Over on X, Sam Altman had a mini-meltdown of his own. He’s scrolling Reddit, sees wall-to-wall posts hyping OpenAI’s Codex… and then it hits him: he literally can’t tell if it’s humans or bots, hyping his own product. Awkward, right?
In his own words:
“AI Twitter/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn’t a year or two ago.”
And honestly? He’s right:
Humans are starting to sound like LLMs (which is kinda wild, since LLMs were supposed to sound like us—not the remix version).
Bots? They’re everywhere. Pumping fake engagement, and bending conversations out of shape.
Even the real hype feels fake now, because the line between human and machine are basically gone.
Put the puzzle together and:
Search traffic is in free fall.
Social spaces feel like bot-ran echo chambers.
Trust? Yeah, that’s evaporating fast.
The Big Picture: The web isn’t just “changing.” It’s basically getting reprogrammed on the fly—by AI, by algorithms, by bots that never sleep . And the wildest part? The loudest confessions are coming from the same folks who hyped this mess to begin with.
Our take:
Don’t buy the PR bedtime stories. When the deniers start spilling tea, you know the problem’s already bigger than their control panel. And unless someone hits the reset button fast, the next version of the internet won’t be built for humans—it’ll be bots talking to bots while we watch from the sidelines.
