Everyone’s hyped about AI agents that can browse the internet for you. Tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT agent or Perplexity are already doing it. But let’s stop for a second and ask: if the agent scrapes content from a site, uses it, and gives it directly to the user — what does the original site gain from that?
Answer: Nothing.
That’s a fundamental flaw in this model. The AI gets the knowledge, the user gets the value — and the source gets ignored. So what now?
At some point, we’ll need an entirely new monetization model to fix this. I’m guessing something like what Spotify did with artists: a payment-per-query system, where websites that actually produce content get compensated each time their data is accessed by an agent. Big content platforms that rely heavily on ad revenue already know what’s coming — and trust me, they’ve started working on this behind closed doors.
This is serious. Because here’s the catch: AI doesn’t generate new knowledge on current topics. That’s not what it does. If the platforms that create fresh knowledge die off, then the whole ecosystem breaks. It’s that simple. Without the source, the system eats itself alive.
Whether a human writes the content or AI helps them doesn’t matter. What matters is that someone actually creates the thing. And creators — just like any business — need a return. Content is a product. If there’s no business model behind that product, no one will want to produce it.
That’s the real issue. If this missing revenue model isn’t solved, the content dries up. And then what’s left for the agents to scrape?
