AI answer engines take content from the entire web but no longer send traffic back, hollowing out the foundation of the content economy. In this AI on Air clip, excerpted from a recent episode on the @Bankless show, the speaker is Matthew Prince @eastdakota, co-founder and CEO of @Cloudflare. ▷ The ads-based business model of the internet is approaching its end game: ad blockers had already pushed CPMs into a slow decline, but over the last two years AI has caused a near step-function drop in ad value. ▷ Google's AI overviews, ChatGPT, and Claude are not search engines but answer engines: they strip mine the web and hand users the answer directly, so no one clicks the links. Without eyeball traffic there is no ad revenue, and content creation is either retreating behind paywalls or shutting down entirely. ▷ For users this saves time, but these AI tools run on paid subscriptions. For people in the global south who cannot afford them, the internet is getting smaller, not bigger.