Web借尸还魂 互联网行将就木

This article puts forward a disruptive new assessment of internet development in the age of AI, with key takeaways as follows:

1. The industry has undergone a dramatic reversal. In 2010, the argument "The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet" claimed that closed apps would replace the open Web. Fifteen years later, the landscape has flipped: the open Web has been resurrected by AI, while the formerly favored closed internet is gradually declining.

2. Core data shows that bot traffic already accounts for a larger share of web traffic than human traffic. Large language models are essentially trained on the massive volume of structured data from the open Web, and AI crawlers now make up the majority of Web traffic.

3. Today’s internet has become a "zombie" mix of humans, AI, and hybrid human-ai entities, with AI-generated content flooding the network. This makes genuine human activity and connection increasingly valuable, and the article suggests that ordinary people prioritize real-world interaction to break out of the bubble of AI content.

This article analyzes shifts in the internet ecosystem in the AI era, delivering actionable insights for brands’ marketing and product strategies:

1. Shifts in consumer and traffic trends: Over half of all internet traffic is now generated by AI bots, making genuine human attention increasingly scarce and valuable. Brands should shift away from chasing pure traffic volume, and instead focus on capturing traffic from real human activity to cut wasteful spending.

2. Adjustments to content strategy: A growing number of content creators are restructuring their content to optimize for AI crawling. When producing content, brands need to balance AI crawlability with human reading experience, and avoid sacrificing user experience for higher crawl volumes.

3. Shifts in underlying logic: The foundation of the internet’s traditional attention economy has eroded. Brands need to adjust their operating logic, and shift focus to building genuine connections with users to earn real trust.

This article unpacks changes in internet traffic and demand in the AI era, outlining clear risk warnings and opportunity directions for sellers:

1. Risk warning: Bots already account for more web traffic than humans. The traditional exposure model that relies on purchasing traffic now suffers from inflated traffic numbers and low conversion efficiency, and the cost-effectiveness of this legacy customer acquisition model will continue to decline, requiring early adjustment.

2. Opportunity directions: Genuine human content and interactive scenarios are growing increasingly scarce. Sellers can build out genuine content creation and real user interaction channels to capture this scarce authentic attention and achieve higher conversion rates.

3. Operational adjustments: AI agents will proactively crawl product information and compare prices. Sellers need to optimize their product information for standardization and tagging to gain more exposure via AI crawling, while also building differentiated advantages to compete amid widespread price transparency.

This article analyzes AI-driven changes in the internet ecosystem, offering insights for factories pursuing digital transformation and new business opportunities:

1. Insights for digital transformation: Modern AI technologies such as large language models rely entirely on the open protocols and massive structured data of the open Web. When advancing digitalization and building in-house AI tools, factories can leverage the open nature of the open Web to lower barriers for data integration and model training, and reduce transformation costs.

2. Product adjustments: Growing AI crawling demand is pushing the entire industry toward more standardized, tagged content. Factories can standardize and tag product information during product design and production information output, to better adapt to AI crawling and distribution, and connect with more downstream sales demands.

3. R&D adjustments: Authentic user demand is increasingly valuable. When developing new products, factories should align more closely with real users’ actual needs, avoid misdirection from false demand signals generated by AI content, and improve product-market fit.

This article outlines the latest development trends of the internet industry in the AI era, clarifying industry directions, core client pain points and new opportunities for service providers:

1. Industry development trends: Web traffic patterns have reversed, with AI bot traffic now surpassing human traffic, and the internet has entered a zombie state dominated by AI content. Service providers that traditionally served human traffic and monetized based on traffic volume need to iterate their business models proactively.

2. Core client pain points: Brands, sellers and content creators all face the challenges of AI traffic diluting genuine attention and making it hard to identify real user demand, as well as the need to adjust content to fit AI crawling requirements. These are core areas where service providers can enter the market.

3. New solution directions: Service providers can develop products around authentic traffic identification and real user demand mining, and also launch content standardization and optimization services tailored for AI crawling, to meet new market demand and open up new growth avenues.

This article analyzes new changes in the internet ecosystem in the AI era, delivering insights for platform operators on operations management, risk mitigation and business expansion:

1. Risk mitigation: The structure of platform traffic has fundamentally changed, with bot traffic now exceeding human traffic. The foundation of traditional advertising and transaction monetization models centered on traffic volume has eroded. Platforms need to adjust their monetization logic early to mitigate monetization risks brought by traffic falsification.

2. Operations management adjustments: Large volumes of AI-generated content flood platforms, leaving users unable to easily verify content authenticity and confirm the identity of interaction partners. Platforms need to build mechanisms to distinguish human from AI content, update content moderation rules, and improve user experience.

3. Business expansion opportunities: As genuine human activity and authentic content grow increasingly valuable, platforms can adjust their recruitment strategies to prioritize onboarding real content creators and legitimate operating merchants, build a differentiated authentic content ecosystem, and develop core competitive advantages.

This article puts forward a disruptive new assessment of internet development in the AI era and maps the latest industry trends, outlining multiple new research directions for scholars:

1. Research on new industry dynamics: The open Web, declared dead in 2010, has been resurrected by the growth of large AI models. Web traffic structure has now reversed, with bot traffic surpassing human traffic for the first time, marking a landmark new juncture in internet development with high research value.

2. Research on emerging problems: The internet has now entered a half-alive "zombie" state, with AI content flooding the entire network. This has not only shaken the underlying logic of the traditional attention economy, but also created new industry issues such as the assimilation of human expression to AI linguistic patterns and falsified traffic, the impacts of which deserve in-depth investigation.

3. Research on business models: The foundational role of the open Web in supporting large AI models, and the new business models that will emerge as the internet restructures around genuine human connection, also warrant further ongoing research and exploration.