Can the internet survive AI summaries?

NPR. Trivia time, Darian. How old is the actor Paul Rudd? I do not know off the top of my head. But I'm gonna ask Google. How old is Paul Rudd? 57 according to the AI overview. Okay. 57. Do you wanna maybe look at one of the websites below the summary? Yeah. That could be a hallucination. Let's double check. Okay. Wikipedia, IMDB, all are verifying. Oh, and People Magazine, all say 57. Okay. You've done your due diligence here. But the fact is, nowadays, when people want answers from Google, they don't click through all the websites. They're just looking at the AI summary. And, this is a trend that has been termed the zero click Internet because you don't have to go to a website to get the information you want. And this is arguably an existential threat to the economics of a lot of the Internet. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darien Woods. And I'm Adrian Ma. Today on the show, how the zero click Internet descended on us, what it means for web publishers, and what some are doing to fight it. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Vanguard. Every day, shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. Now you can make your voice heard too. Vanguard investor choice makes it easy to set your proxy voting preference for your eligible Vanguard index funds. Visit vanguard dot com slash investor choice to learn more. Vanguard investors own shares of their index funds, and those funds own shares of the companies they invest in. Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. This message comes from Capella University. You know that feeling when there's a spark building inside you that you were meant for more? That's your own drive pushing you towards what's next. Capella University gets that. With their FlexPath learning format, you can set the pace and earn your degree without putting life on pause. You've built experience and know what you're capable of. Now this is your time to turn that momentum into more. The only real question is, what can't you do? Learn more at capella.edu. In the early days of the web, people had this metaphor for the Internet, the information superhighway, a vast world where people happily roamed between big cities, small villages, and quirky roadside attractions. But over the years, the Internet has shifted to looking less like a vast open landscape and more like a series of walled gardens, a world where our most popular apps and platforms do their best to keep you inside their walls so you never have to click away to an outside website. Amanda Natividad works in marketing for a company called SparkToro, and she's coauthor of a forthcoming book called Zero Click Marketing. She says the zero click trend has actually been in the making for years now. Platforms discovered they could capture more value by owning the answers, right, by owning the audience …