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.
Written by
John Rambrandt
I’m a computer engineer who spends my time building for the Web and contributing to open source, but I’ve always been obsessed with how things break. I treat cybersecurity as a puzzle that involves both code and people, blending technical defense with a deep dive into the psychology of social engineering. My goal is simple: build tools that are open, scalable, and actually resilient against real-world threats.
