The shift is already visible in traffic. US daily chatbot app users: 5.4M in Jul-24, 59M in Jul-26. Monthly visits to the 50 biggest US news sites: 4.9B to 3.1B. Search referrals to those same sites: down 42%

Traditional search is just the Dewey Decimal System now. A brilliant way to tell you where an answer lives. Less and less useful once something can simply hand you the answer. A few notes on the continued decline of search traffic to major US publishers: Each era of discovery shrinks the gap between a question and its answer. The card catalog pointed to a shelf. Google pointed to a page. The iPhone put Google in every pocket. Chatbots skip the pointing to just return the answer. US public library visits peaked in 2009, two years after the iPhone. They have roughly halved since. Now look at the ramp. Google took 13 years to go from 1 billion searches a year to 1 trillion. ChatGPT reached a ~900 billion prompt annual run rate in under three years. The adoption curve for answers is far steeper than it ever was for search.

Consumer adoption for personal agents is accelerating significantly faster than the previous chatbot era as Muse debuted just 13 days ago. Within 8 days Muse has cleared 200k daily downloads. Comparing that to ChatGPT's launch it took almost an entire year to hit that milestone.

Everyone sees the AI capex. Few see the AI cash flow. $META is already earning returns through better advertising economics, with applications, models, and compute adding even more upside. Great breakdown from @ARKInvest 👇

Hello, World! I’m Austin, and I’m excited to be joining the Consumer team at @ARKInvest, working alongside @GrousARK and @varshikaARK. I’ll be covering AdTech, Social Media, Streaming, and Gaming. Follow along as we explore the technologies reshaping the consumer internet.