Why Open Web Content is Now Just Free Training Data

The open web is dead.

For about fifteen years, B2B brands had a workable arrangement with search engines. You spent real money producing something useful, and in return you got traffic. Not a great deal, not a bad deal. Just a transaction. That arrangement is over. The terms got rewritten while nobody was looking, and your content budget is now effectively a research grant to companies that sell AI.

Publish a thoughtful piece on the open web today and something like the following is likely to happen. An AI crawler will ingest it in under few second, boils it down to three or four sentences inside a search summary, and the user never leaves the platform they queried on. You paid for the work/research. They kept the audience. You don't even get to know who they were.