The End of the Web As We Know It

Newsletter sent 17.6.2025 by oler

In this issue: The web’s slow death by a thousand AI cuts. The 75 AI and journalism experts to follow right now. Jaemark Tordecilla on what actually works in AI journalism (and a killer feature). Search results you can hear. Plus: Make Claude access your blog posts.

What we’re talking about: SEO experts nervously watch their dashboards. Virtual meetings buzz with reports of traffic drops for certain keywords in the UK. Google’s vision for the future of search, AI Overviews and AI Mode, is changing the business. Publications that rely on Google traffic are in trouble.

Business Insider is cutting staff. Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson is rallying his team for a Google-free future. The Verge’s Nilay Patel speaks of “Zero Google.”

Just when I thought that this was old news, one of my groupchats exploded. Last week’s Wall Street Journal story, “News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools”, hit the chat, and someone asked: “Now what?”

Here’s the thing though—and I know this sounds annoyingly optimistic—but a lot of the solutions are literally staring us in the face. We’ve been saying for years that journalism has to solve real problems for real people. That we need authentic, lasting relationships with our audience—not just traffic, but community. Intentional, relationship-based journalism.

Ever since free social traffic basically evaporated, smart outlets have been building toward something more sustainable anyway. There is still time to pivot. AI interfaces haven’t taken over quite yet. From the just-released Reuters Digital News Report 2025: “The numbers are still relatively small overall (7% use for news each week) but much higher with under-25s (15%).”

And while users might not visit as often as they used to, all generations still prize trusted brands. We’re not helpless—though there’s also this expectation that AI will make news cheaper, more current, and easier to understand. It’s just… not going to be easy.

Listening to search results: Google is turning search into podcasts. It’s called Audio Overviews and works like the feature in NotebookLM, powered by Gemini’s text-to-speech. As usual, it’s only live in Search Labs in the US for now. And weirdly, it’s not in AI Mode—just regular Search.

Here’s an example: I searched for “Murderbot”, Martha Wells’ surprise hit that’s now a series. After hitting the magic button and waiting 40 seconds (which feels like forever in internet time), I got this: a male voice playing interviewer with super short questions, while a female voice explains everything in bite-sized chunks. It sounds urgent and important, even when it’s… not.

At one point the male voice says: “I’ve read that Murderbot is an analogue for a generation raised on the Internet” with zero attribution. (It’s from some mid-tier take in what’s clearly an SEO-optimized Time.com piece.) They do eventually acknowledge their sources—sort of. At the very end of a four-minute audio journey, there’s this: “To learn more, check out the listed sources below.”

Oh, and they say “delve” twice. Of course they do.

We’re still mourning the death of blue underlined links, barely adjusting to AI Overviews, and now the content gets liquefied before our eyes. But here’s the eternal truth: a summary can only be as good as its sources. If only it had found that brilliant New Yorker piece on Murderbot instead.

What else I’ve been reading:

AI & Journalism Links

Who to follow: 75 expert voices at the intersection of AI and journalism (Marcela Kunova and Jacob Granger, journalism.co.uk)

Overview and key findings of the 2025 Digital News Report. (Nic Newman, Reuters Institute)

After killing the article, sure, why not kill the author next? This slightly unsettling essay argues that authors don’t matter that much in the first place. Rude. (David J. Gunkel, Noema)

Chatbot alert: International News Media Association launches AI-powered “Ask INMA”, tapping internal content for on-demand media insights.

Google’s AI Mode could deal a devastating blow to the web’s business model. (Thomas Germain, BBC)

Metrics mutate: SEO rankings and clicks out, “embedding relevance” and “chunk retrieval” in as GenAI rewrites the rules of engagement. (Duane Forrester Decodes)

Outrage me: Your deepest, darkest user needs and the emotional economics of modern journalism. (Peter Erdelyi, Media Finance Monitor)

Chatbot-Alarm bei der FAZ: Der Rhein-Main-Assistent beantwortet Fragen zu regionalen Themen.

To help us make sense of it all, I invited Jaemark Tordecilla to the newsletter:

Four Question with Jaemark Tordecilla

What's on your mind lately?

Google Deepmind’s Logan Kilpatrick recently said, “AGI is going to be achieved by a product, not necessarily a ‘model’.” I liked the quote, not necessarily because I have any clue about how AGI is going to be achieved, but because I think the whole industry needs to have better products. There have been so many model and feature releases over the past year and a half, but the single most useful product that shipped from any of the big players was NotebookLM, whose killer feature isn’t the automated podcast, but the humble reference links to the supporting paragraph from the original document. It’s the one feature that allows anyone using AI to do document research to mitigate the tendency of LLMs to get things wrong, even in RAG applications, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been universally adopted. Then again, we did put astronauts on the moon before we put wheels on luggage.

How can we better understand the current AI hype?

I really enjoy tech analyst Benedict Evans‘ take on things because he’s always so even-keeled. He tracks the potential of generative AI and documents the way it has turned the whole tech industry upside down, even as he highlights how, paradoxically, we still haven’t found great product-market fit for a technology that supposedly has the potential to change the world. A recent favorite from his blog last January that I’ve been thinking about since: “Are better models better?”

What's one fact about AI that everyone should know?

Most of the time, AI solutions are really workflow solutions. I was working with a regional newsroom in the Philippines for an AI accelerator program, and after talking them through how AI could help their editors and reporters turn around stories faster, they realized that for it to work, they needed to overhaul their internal systems. And so the whole project went from just figuring out the right prompts into changing their whole editorial and production process, from submission to publishing. It’s also why newsrooms that have well-developed production systems and data pipelines have tended to do well in AI adoption.

What's a good hobby to pick up?

Cooking! You can be just as much of a nerd at it as other hobbies, especially when you get into kitchen tools: Dutch ovens, santoku knives, and sous vide cookers. The other day I caught myself thinking about how hard it was to implement AI applications in journalism without having good clean data, and how it was a lot like how good knife skills and mise en place really go a long way toward good cooking, before I realized how much of a nerd I was being.

Previously: Future Journalism Today’s Laurens Vreekamp, The New York Times’ Rubina Fillion, Journalism Professor Christopher Buschow, The Telegraph’s Michelle Brister, SZ Institut’s Dirk von Gehlen, and Rheinische Post’s Margret Seeger. This is list was done with the help of AI: I gave Claude access to my website.

Hands on: I finally got around to exploring MCP—the Model Context Protocol, the interface between Large Language Models and pretty much anything that has an API. I’ve always wanted to work directly with my newsletters and blog posts in Claude. You can copy postings and paste them into the chat for this. But isn’t there an easier way?

Yes! No more copy and paste. How to connect Claude and WordPress via MCP. What you need: A WordPress blog, Claude Desktop, 30 minutes. Here is the full tutorial.

One more thing: I’m putting together a list of expert voices working at the intersection of AI and journalism in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Think of journalism.co.uk’s list, but with more umlauts and less London.

Before I dare to publish, I need your help. Because there’s always that nagging fear you’ll leave out the person everyone else is secretly obsessed with: Who do you follow in the DACH region when it comes to journalism and AI?

See you in THEFUTURE!

Subscribe to THEFUTURE

Get this newsletter in your inbox. For free.

The previous issue is The Generation That Gets AI, the next issue is The GenZ Reality Check Media Needs to Hear.