More than half the internet isn't human anymore

Their CEO expected this to happen in 2027. It arrived more than a year early.

Here’s the part that matters for your business.

The way customers find you is quietly being handed off to machines.

Think about how you used to find a plumber, a dentist, a place for dinner. You searched, you scrolled, you clicked a few links, you decided. Now think about how that’s starting to work: you ask an AI assistant, and it goes and does the searching for you. Where you might have checked five websites before choosing, an AI agent checks five thousand then hands you a short list, or just one answer.

You never see the other 4,999. And neither does the customer.

This is the shift. We’re moving from a web where people browse to a web where agents browse on their behalf. And in that world, the question stops being “does my website look good to a visitor?” and becomes “can an AI actually find, read, and understand my business well enough to recommend it?”

For most businesses, the honest answer right now is no.

Why most websites are about to go invisible

Most small business websites were built for human eyes. A nice header, some photos, a contact form. That was enough when humans were the ones doing the looking.

But AI agents don’t experience a website the way you do. They read its structure: the underlying data, the way information is organized and labeled, and the signals that tell a machine what this business is, who it serves, and why it should be trusted. This is the world of SEO (search engine optimization), and increasingly GEO and AEO, or generative engine optimization and answer engine optimization. The practices that make a site legible to AI, not just to people.

Almost no small business sites are built this way. Which means as more customers let their AI do the searching, those businesses simply won’t come up. Not because they’re worse, but because they’re unreadable to the systems now making the recommendations.

It’s the digital equivalent of having a great shop on a street that’s quietly being rerouted around you.

The good news

This is fixable, and right now it’s an advantage rather than an emergency because so few businesses have caught on. The ones that get their site structured correctly now, while everyone else is still building for the old web, get found while their competitors disappear from the results.

A few things worth doing, whether you work with someone or tackle them yourself:

• Make sure your site has proper structured data, the behind-the-scenes labels that tell AI exactly what your business is and does.

• Publish content that answers the real questions your customers ask, in plain language. AI agents surface answers, not slogans.

• Keep your core business details consistent everywhere they appear online. Machines trust consistency.

• Stop thinking of your website as a brochure and start thinking of it as the source AI reads to decide whether to recommend you.

The internet isn’t ending. It’s being rewired. The businesses that adapt early won’t just keep up, they’ll quietly pull ahead while everyone else wonders where their traffic went.

That’s the other way of looking at it. And it’s the whole reason this newsletter exists.

Otherworks builds websites, tools, and AI workflows designed for exactly this shift, so your business stays findable as search moves from people to machines. If you’ve been wondering whether your site is ready for what’s coming, that’s a good conversation to have. [Start a project →]

Zach, Otherworks