The modern internet was built on a simple bargain. Websites created content. Search engines sent users to those websites. For more than two decades, this arrangement powered the growth of the open web. Every search generated opportunities for publishers, businesses, researchers, educators, and creators. A regional newspaper could find readers. A small business could find customers.
A student could build an audience. Discovery was free, and participation was open to almost everyone. This model helped create one of the most democratic information systems in history. Millions of independent websites could compete for attention because users were directed to the source of information rather than kept inside a single platform. Today, that model is being replaced. The internet industry is shifting from search engines to answer engines. Instead of presenting a list of links, AI systems increasingly generate complete responses directly on the platform.
The goal is no longer to help users find information. The goal is to provide the information immediately. For users, this is convenient. Questions can be answered faster and with less effort. But convenience changes the economics of the web. The traditional internet rewarded people for creating useful content because visitors reached the websites that produced it. AI answer engines sever that connection. Information remains visible, but the economic value generated by that information increasingly flows elsewhere. The result is a transfer of value away from creators and toward AI platforms.
Content is created by millions of websites, but the economic rewards increasingly accumulate to a small group of companies operating the answer engines. The open web distributes attention across millions of destinations. AI answer engines concentrate attention inside platforms controlled by OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic. This shift matters everywhere, but it matters especially in India. India’s digital economy was built on low-cost participation. Small publishers, regional-language websites, educators, bloggers, and local businesses could all grow through search.
They did not need large advertising budgets or venture capital funding. They needed visibility. As the internet moves from search to answers, many of these participants risk losing the mechanism that allowed them to compete. Large corporations can rely on established brands, proprietary platforms, and direct customer relationships. Smaller creators often cannot. In India, the idea that subscriptionbased access to AI can replace the open web economy is also economically unrealistic for most users.
Many AI tools cost around $20 per month, or roughly Rs 2,000. This is a high price for a large share of internet users. It becomes even more impractical if someone needs access to multiple AI models. The result is that the emerging AI layer is not only centralized around a few platforms, but also economically inaccessible to large parts of the Indian internet population that historically relied on free, open discovery through search. There is also a second imbalance: infrastructure.
The current wave of AI depends on massive investment in data centers, chips, and energy and cooling infrastructure. Most of this buildout is happening in the United States, where companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are rapidly expanding large-scale AI infrastructure today. These are not just software changes – they are physical investments that create jobs, energy demand, and long-term technological capacity. In India, the picture is different. There are announcements and long-term commitments from the same companies about future AI and cloud expansion, but the large-scale infrastructure buildout is still very limited when compared to the United States.
This creates a timing gap: India is experiencing the disruption caused by AI systems without yet receiving a proportional share of the physical investment that powers them. If AI becomes as central to the economy as expected, India may eventually benefit from more local infrastructure. But if the AI wave slows down, stalls, or fails to deliver the expected economic returns, then the major buildout gains – construction, energy expansion, hardware supply chains – will have already been captured elsewhere, and India will have experienced only the disruption without the offsetting upside.
Supporters of AI argue that new business models will eventually emerge. They may be right. But there is currently no clear replacement for the economic role that the click played. Subscription-based AI services primarily generate revenue for the platforms themselves, not for the millions of websites that supply much of the knowledge being summarized. The long-term risk is not the disappearance of information. The risk is the gradual weakening of the incentives that produce information in the first place.
A web that becomes less rewarding for independent creators is likely to become less diverse, less innovative, less open, even let’s say less rich. The internet flourished because it allowed anyone to publish and anyone to be discovered. That principle depended on a simple action repeated billions of times every day: the click. As search engines evolve into answer engines, that click is becoming less important. If it disappears entirely, the consequences will extend far beyond traffic statistics. The economic foundation of the open web itself will erode.
(The writer, an expert on energy, contributes to journals in India and overseas. The views are personal.)