The audience hasn't changed. People still want the same things they've always wanted online.
What's changing is how they get what they want.
Right now, someone might ask an AI agent to find them an apartment instead of scrolling through listings themselves. The intent is identical. The visitor to your product is different.
People Still Want Six Things
- Quick answers (still the big one, roughly 61% of why anyone opens a browser)
- Learning something new
- Entertainment
- Staying connected with people they care about
- Sharing their own creations
- And actually buying or booking things
Same six motivations. Same humans. Different intermediary.
The Interface Layer Flipped
AI isn't replacing the internet. It's replacing how people access it.
58.5% of Google searches now end with nobody clicking anything. The answer shows up in the AI summary, people get what they need, they move on. When AI Overviews appear, organic click-through rates drop 61%. Paid ads fall 68%.
Even searches without AI Overviews are seeing 41% fewer clicks year over year.
Perplexity launched shopping with PayPal last month. Research a product, buy it, never leave the chat. OpenAI's Operator books travel and restaurants. Real transactions, real money changing hands.
Deloitte projects 25% of companies using generative AI will pilot autonomous agents this year. Half by 2027.
The Advertising Question
If users don't visit your site, where do the ads go?
The current model assumes eyeballs on pages. Sponsored products on marketplaces like Amazon work because shoppers scroll through results. Google ads work because people see the search page. Display ads work because visitors land on publisher sites.
AI agents can potentially break all of that.
When someone asks Perplexity to find running shoes under $150, they're not scrolling through sponsored listings. The agent does the filtering. Amazon's whole sponsored products model (which drove 24% year-over-year ad growth in Q3 2025) depends on humans browsing. Same with Google's $60 billion quarterly search revenue.
The platforms see this coming. Google started putting ads inside AI Overviews this year. Perplexity launched sponsored follow-up questions (the "Related Questions" section accounts for 40% of all their queries).
But the math is different. AI search ad spending sits at roughly $1 billion in 2025. Projections say $25.9 billion by 2029. That's growth, sure. But Google alone does $200 billion annually in ads. The gap is enormous.
The question: will AI agents even show ads? Or do they filter them out as noise? One retail analyst put it bluntly: "Right now, ads and algorithms constantly push products at you. An agent would act FOR you and filter out all that manipulative stuff."
If agents optimize for user outcomes rather than advertiser payments, the entire monetization layer gets squeezed.
What Actually Survives
Not everything gets hit equally.
Finding stuff is most exposed. Sites that aggregate common answers? Trouble. But primary sources with unique data, original research with named expertise... that survives. AI needs something to cite.
Learning shifts in a strange way. Generic courses compete against AI tutoring that costs nothing. Bad comparison for the courses. But credentials employers trust? Labs where you prove competence? Those hold.
Buying gets inverted. Your checkout flow matters less. Your backend API and structured product data matter more. Whether an agent can programmatically understand your inventory, pricing, terms... that's the new interface.
Human connection stays protected. Probably forever. This one feels different. So maybe trust in certain marketplaces will be the moat.
Building for Agents, Not Just Algorithms
The customer is the same person with the same needs. But you might never interact with them directly.
If someone's AI agent compares you against competitors, what does it see? Clean structured data it can parse? Or marketing copy that means nothing to a machine?
The old question: "Will users find my website?"
The new question: "Will their AI agent choose my product?"
And maybe the harder question: "Will their AI even show them my ad?"
The humans are still there. They just stopped showing up in person. And the ads... the ads might not make the trip either.
We spent twenty years getting really good at reaching people. They'll spend the next two hiring someone else to be reached.