AI Search Could Break the Web

AI searching tools may disrupt the digital economy by limiting creators’ exposure, showing the need for fair reward systems to support diverse content creation online.

In late October, News Corp filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI, a popular AI search engine. At first glance, this might seem unremarkable. After all, the lawsuit joins more than two dozen similar cases seeking credit, consent, or compensation for the use of data by AI developers. Yet this particular dispute is different, and it might be the most consequential of them all.

At stake is the future of AI search—that is, chatbots that summarize information from across the web. If their growing popularity is any indication, these AI “answer engines” could replace traditional search engines as our default gateway to the internet. While ordinary AI chatbots can reproduce—often unreliably—information learned through training, AI search tools like Perplexity, Google’s Gemini, or OpenAI’s now-public SearchGPT aim to retrieve and repackage information from third-party websites. They return a short digest to users along with links to a handful of sources, ranging from research papers to Wikipedia articles and YouTube transcripts. The AI system does the reading and writing, but the information comes from outside.

At its best, AI search can better infer a user’s intent, amplify quality content, and synthesize information from diverse sources. But if AI search becomes our primary portal to the web, it threatens to disrupt an already precarious digital economy. Today, the production of content online depends on a fragile set of incentives tied to virtual foot traffic: ads, subscriptions, donations, sales, or brand exposure. By shielding the web behind an all-knowing chatbot, AI search could deprive creators of the visits and “eyeballs” they need to survive.

If AI searches break up this ecosystem, existing law is unlikely to help. Governments already believe that content is falling through cracks in the legal system, and they are learning to regulate the flow of value across the web in other ways. The AI industry should use this narrow window of opportunity to build a smarter content marketplace before governments fall back on interventions that are ineffective, benefit only a select few, or hamper the free flow of ideas across the web.

AI searching tools may disrupt the digital economy by limiting creators’ exposure, showing the need for fair reward systems to support diverse content creation online.

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