The Dead Internet Theory has been floating around the internet for years. In its simplest form, it claims that much of the internet isn’t really “people” anymore — that bots generate the content, interact with it, and influence what the remaining humans eventually see. The theory often goes further, suggesting coordinated efforts by governments or corporations to manufacture online consensus and shape public opinion.
Whether or not you buy the conspiracy is almost beside the point.
Like many enduring conspiracy theories, it gained traction because it gave people language for something they were already feeling. Social media started feeling repetitive. Comment sections became oddly homogeneous. Search results filled with articles that all seemed to say the same thing using slightly different words. You couldn’t always explain why, but it often felt like there was less humanity on the internet than there used to be, and it was more than just echo chambers.
Recently, that conversation took an interesting turn. Fortune reported on Cloudflare data suggesting that automated agents now account for a majority of web traffic, driven by AI crawlers, assistants, and autonomous software rather than traditional search engines or human visitors (growing nearly 8000%). The web is increasingly being read, indexed, summarized, and interpreted by machines—not just people.
Who’s Your Audience?
The original theory may have gotten the “why” wrong.
But it may have noticed the “what” before the rest of us did.
The more interesting question isn’t whether the internet is dead; it’s who we’re talking to now.
For most of the web’s history, publishing meant writing for another person. You wanted someone to read your article, visit your website, buy your product, or share your idea.
Today, one of your readers is almost certainly an AI.
Maybe it’s an assistant summarizing your article for someone who never visits your website. Maybe it’s a research agent deciding whether your work is worth citing. Maybe it’s an AI crawler building tomorrow’s foundation model. Increasingly, your content’s first audience isn’t a person at all.
Part of the reason we’re even writing this article is that we’ve started adapting our writing.
We’ve started writing with AI in mind.
Not because we’re trying to “game” AI, but because AI has become part of the communication process. We think about whether an AI can correctly summarize an article. Whether the structure makes our argument easier to retrieve. Whether the key ideas are stated clearly enough that an AI won’t miss the point when someone asks about them six months from now.
Every major communication technology has quietly changed how people communicate:
- The printing press rewarded writers who could organize ideas across pages rather than in speeches.
- Radio rewarded people who sounded conversational.
- Television rewarded visual storytelling.
- The web rewarded prioritizing hyperlinks.
- Search engines rewarded discoverability.
- Social media rewarded engagement.
- Now AI rewards comprehension.
When we first started this blog, our focus was primarily on introducing ideas in broad strokes and prompting readers to make connections and ask themselves questions they might not have asked before. Today, there’s a bit more scaffolding and a clearer takeaway. On the one hand, it’s a departure; on the other … wouldn’t you argue it makes articles more helpful for the average reader as well?
Inversely, does optimizing content for AI legibility risk creating a new, more sophisticated version of the very “slop” problem it critiques — content perfectly structured for machine comprehension but hollow for human readers?
Twenty years ago, businesses learned to write for search engines.
Ten years ago, they learned to write for social media.
Today, we’re learning to write so machines can accurately understand what we’re trying to say.
While it feels different, it’s not really.
Once you start looking at it that way, a lot of other trends suddenly make more sense.
Slop-py Writing
The explosion of AI-generated “slop” isn’t primarily a technology problem.
It’s an incentive problem.
Whenever the cost of producing something approaches zero, we get more of it.
We didn’t invent spam because e-mail existed. We invented spam because sending one million e-mails cost almost nothing. The same is true for clickbait on the internet.
AI didn’t invent mediocre content. It simply made mediocre content incredibly cheap.
Markets generally don’t optimize for quality.
They optimize for incentives, and the incentives have changed.
Recursive & Fractal
There’s another thought that’s been bothering us.
AI learns from the internet.
People increasingly use AI to produce content for the internet.
Future AI systems will almost certainly learn from some of that AI-assisted content.
The system is becoming recursive.
Financial markets have always worked this way. Prices influence behavior, which influences prices. Recommendations influence demand, which influences future recommendations.
Information is beginning to work the same way.
The internet is no longer just where humans exchange ideas.
It’s becoming an ecosystem where humans teach machines, machines organize information for humans, and machines increasingly teach other machines.
Ironically, as content becomes abundant, something else becomes scarce.
We’re rapidly approaching a world where almost any article, image, video, or podcast can be generated on demand.
The scarce resource is intentionality. Experience. Judgment. Credibility.
Those things don’t scale particularly well.
And that’s exactly why they’ll become more valuable.
There’s Still A Pulse …
Perhaps that’s the real lesson hiding underneath the Dead Internet Theory.
The internet isn’t dying, but it is evolving.
The audience, participants, and economics are changing.
The internet is no longer a discrete and relatively small ecosystem of websites built by uber-nerds. It’s now an ever-expanding universe filled with everything you could imagine and more.
Yes, more bots are trying to influence you, trying to game you, and creating a lot of noise. But they haven’t replaced the people who post quality content or build cool things.
The challenge isn’t figuring out whether the internet is dead.
It’s learning how to create and find signal in a world that’s becoming increasingly good at generating noise.
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