kottke.orgMar 31
Endgame for the Open Web, brought on by LLM bots, content summarizing while driving no traffic, increasing paywalls for information of all kinds, locking down APIs (due to AI abuse), attacks on Wikipedia, disruption of open source communities, etc. https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/
Endgame for the Open Web

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Anil Dash
Show threadJan Schaumann

@kottke @anildash This is relevant to my current interests.

My own timeline for the end of the open web goes
1. Search and AI are merging
2. SEO becomes AIO
3. Browsers become AI agents
4. Disallow non-AI web clients
5. Enshittify the AI/Browser App
6. Charge a subscription price for web "search"

With Copilot placing ads in PRs and companies bending over backwards to create content and APIs for AI agents only, we're several steps along the way already.

https://www.netmeister.org/blog/open-web.html

The End of the Open Web

Do you remember the Open Web? Web rings, directories, quirky resources out in the open, without the need to sign in anywhere. But I fear we're seeing the beginning of the end of this wonderful shared platform.

Mar 31 at 4:51pmWeb