The Zero-Click Problem — What Happens When Nobody Visits Your Website
The last week of May 2025 was dominated by Microsoft Build and Google I/O. The demos were impressive — AI agents that write code, generate video, hold conversations. Every tech publication covered the spectacle.
I was more interested in something quieter. Both companies, in their own way, announced the same thing: search is no longer about links. It's about answers.
When you search for something in 2025, you increasingly don't get a list of ten blue links. You get a single AI-generated summary. The answer appears on the search page itself. You read it. You move on. You never click through to the website that created the knowledge in the first place.
In the industry, this is called the "zero-click" result. I think it's the most consequential change to the internet's economics in a decade.
The Contract That Built the Internet
For thirty years, the web operated on an implicit deal. Search engines sent you to creators. Creators got traffic. Traffic converted into revenue — ad impressions, course sales, consulting leads, or simply attention that built a reputation.
This deal is why the internet has so much free, high-quality knowledge. It's why DigitalOcean published thousands of deep-dive Linux tutorials. Why independent developers wrote detailed framework guides. Why food bloggers documented recipes with painstaking precision. Why Stack Overflow accumulated fifteen years of programming answers.
None of this was charity. It was an economic system. Creators invested 20, 40, 60 hours into a piece of content because the traffic it generated made that investment worthwhile. The quality of the content determined the traffic, and the traffic determined the return.
Zero-click search breaks this contract.
The knowledge still gets consumed — it's embedded in the AI's training data and surfaces in the summary. But the creator who produced that knowledge is never visited. The traffic never arrives. The economics that justified the investment evaporate.
The Incentive Problem
I keep coming back to a specific question: if zero-click becomes the default experience, who writes the next DigitalOcean tutorial?
Not DigitalOcean. Their tutorials exist because they drive traffic that converts into cloud hosting customers. Remove the traffic, and the business case for maintaining a library of 3,000+ technical deep-dives collapses.
Not independent creators. A technical writer who spends 40 hours researching and writing a comprehensive guide does so because it ranks in search, attracts readers, and generates some combination of ad revenue, course sales, or professional credibility. If the AI summary captures the answer and the reader never visits, the 40-hour investment generates zero return.
This isn't hypothetical. Traffic data from content-dependent sites has been trending downward since AI search features started rolling out. The sites that built the internet's knowledge base — the ones that AI models were trained on — are losing the visitors that funded their existence.
The uncomfortable question: AI search is built on a foundation of human-created knowledge. If the economics of creating that knowledge are destroyed, what happens to the foundation?
The Format Question
There's a structural layer to this that gets less attention. Microsoft announced NL Web at Build — a framework that makes websites "AI-friendly" by structuring content in ways that AI agents can parse more effectively. It's positioned as a free, helpful tool.
The structural question is more interesting: what happens to sites that don't adopt these AI-optimized formats?
There's precedent here. A decade ago, Google started using HTTPS as a ranking signal. The message was clear — adopt HTTPS or watch your search ranking decline. Within a few years, the entire web migrated. It was the right technical decision, but the mechanism was a ranking penalty, not a recommendation.
If AI-friendly formatting becomes a prerequisite for surfacing in search results, the open web's format — simple HTML, written for humans — starts losing to proprietary schemas written for AI consumption. The knowledge doesn't disappear, but who gets to present it shifts from "anyone who writes well" to "anyone who formats their content according to the AI's preferred schema."
That's a different internet.
What's Actually at Stake
The internet's intellectual richness comes from its distribution. Millions of independent creators, each contributing expertise in their specific domain. A retired professor writing about metallurgy. A systems engineer documenting database optimization patterns. A farmer explaining crop rotation schedules. No single company could hire all these people. The open web didn't need to — the economic model made it worthwhile for them to contribute voluntarily.
If zero-click search collapses that model, what replaces it?
The most likely answer: the platforms themselves produce the content. Google and Microsoft have the resources to generate AI-written tutorials, guides, and explainers. These will be competent. They will also be homogeneous. Written by the same models, trained on the same data, optimized for the same metrics.
The internet we've known — messy, opinionated, occasionally brilliant, built by people who cared enough to spend 40 hours on a tutorial nobody asked for — is a specific kind of ecosystem. It exists because of a specific economic model. If that model breaks, the ecosystem changes.
I don't think this is a problem that gets solved by any single decision. But I do think it's a problem that gets worse if engineers and creators don't recognize what's shifting. The demos at Build and I/O were genuinely impressive. The business model underneath them deserves the same attention.
The best AI features in the world don't matter much if they're built on a knowledge base that's no longer being replenished.
This is the creator-economics side of a shift that also shows up in how developer tools are losing their business models and what happens when AI controls the runtime. The pattern is consistent: AI doesn't just change what gets built — it changes who captures the value.