Your Agent Read the Page. Nobody Saw the Ad.
The web's economics rest on an assumption so old nobody wrote it down: the thing loading the page has eyeballs. A human arrives, an ad impression fires, an affiliate cookie drops, an analytics event attributes the visit — and that chain of tiny monetization events pays for the content. Every part of that chain is now breaking at once, because a growing share of your site's readers aren't people. They're agents, and an agent doesn't see ads. It extracts the answer, hands it to a user somewhere else, and leaves nothing behind but a log line.
This isn't a distant publisher problem you can watch from the engineering sidelines. If you build anything on retrieval — a RAG pipeline, an agent that browses, a product that summarizes the web — you are on the demand side of a market whose supply side just discovered it's been giving away inventory for free. The correction is underway, it has infrastructure and standards behind it, and it lands on your architecture as a new cost line and a new failure mode: upstream sources that were free and open last quarter going paywalled, licensed, or dark this quarter.
