In February Norway's consumer protection agency put out a comedy sketch about a man who makes things deliberately worse, but can now do it to millions at once. It ran alongside a 100-page report, signed by more than 70 consumer groups, concluding that digital products are getting worse on purpose.
A few months back we argued that AI was hollowing out the web, training on human content and then replacing the platforms that made it. Plenty of you agreed the web was dying but pushed back on the cause. The fault, you said, was how the web already worked. This one takes that seriously.
The word that keeps recurring is "enshittification," coined by author Cory Doctorow in a November 2022 blog post. The American Dialect Society named it Word of the Year in 2023, and Doctorow published a book expanding it in October 2025.
His framework runs in three stages. A platform first offers something genuinely useful to attract users. Once they are locked in, it degrades their experience to serve advertisers. Then it squeezes users and advertisers alike to maximise returns. All the major platforms seem to be hitting that final stage together.
The decaying web
Rewind to before ChatGPT launched. The recipe website is the obvious symbol. You search for chicken soup and land on a 2,000-word essay about someone's childhood, buried under cookie popups, autoplay videos and a full-screen interstitial with a close button the size of a pinhead.
That happened because Google rewarded depth and evidence of first-hand experience, so bloggers padded pages with personal stories to lift time on page. The webpage became the product, optimised for ad impressions, and the recipe was just the bait.
Google itself was part of the decay. A 2024 SparkToro study found that for every 1,000 US searches, only 360 clicks reached the open web. Nearly 30% went to Google's own properties, and AI Overviews now drain even more traffic from the publishers whose work they summarise.
Social media had degraded the information environment years earlier. Facebook swapped chronological feeds for engagement-optimised ones, Instagram followed, and Twitter slid into X. The Norwegian report cited Reuters estimating Meta earns around $16 billion a year from fraudulent ads.
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Why the migration to AI felt like relief
Against that backdrop, chatbots were not really a disruption. Wading through blue links to an ad-choked page only to find the answer missing is a poor experience. A clean interface that gives you a fast, personalised answer solves it.
An Adobe survey from May 2025 found 54% of people using ChatGPT as a search engine did so because it summarised complex topics quickly. 77% said results felt more personalised than Google's, and 24% of Americans now prefer it for finding information, rising to 28% among Gen Z.
For two decades the publishing default was to make your content available for free and live off advertising, a model many knew was degrading the product but felt too risky to abandon. The problem is, few lived off it at all.
The publishers who adapted early are surviving. The New York Times built a paywall and sued OpenAI. The Financial Times licensed its content. None of this excuses training on the open web without paying, but the erosion moved fast because so little was protecting the content.
AI is now subject to the same gravity
By the end of 2025 OpenAI had reached around $20 billion in annualised revenue, roughly triple the year before, while losing billions. Deutsche Bank reported internal projections of cumulative losses reaching $143 billion before profitability. ChatGPT Pro at $200 a month reportedly does not cover its compute.
Google can subsidise its AI features with close to $300 billion a year in search and YouTube ad revenue. OpenAI has no such cushion. In January it confirmed it would show ads to free users and to its lower-priced Go tier, tied to the content of conversations.
So the company that built its name on a clean alternative to Google arrived at Google's business model within three years. A chatbot with close to a billion weekly users, many volunteering exactly what they want, is the richest source of purchase intent ever assembled.
There are reasons for cautious optimism. Subscriptions make the user the customer rather than the product. Open models like DeepSeek and Llama reduce the lock-in that precedes enshittification. And Doctorow notes more antitrust activity in the past four years than the previous forty.
Whether that arrives in time is the open question. The web did not decay because bad people set out to ruin it. It decayed because the economics rewarded decay and nobody changed the rules. AI is now standing in the same queue, and on current evidence phase one is already over.
