The Internet Is Hurtling Towards a Wasteland of AI Ads for AI Bots

We are in a nightmarish AI-based recursive capitalistic loop, an ouroboros fake people trying to sell stuff to other fake people. The Dead Internet Theory is in full effect, the World Wide Web that once connected us all now reduced to a series of propagandistic bots talking to each other, and soon those bots will be selling stuff to each other too.

Google basically invented the modern internet ad economy. Now they’re busy dismantling that infrastructure, shifting the internet ad business away from selling products and services to humans and using AI bots to buy things from other bots, presuming that we lazy humans of the future can no longer be bothered shopping for products.

Imagine that we’ll all just give an AI a hazy description of the thing we want, and the AI will buy it for us.

According to a report from Semafor, the shift is centered around Google’s Agent2Agent protocol, a system where AI agents talk to each other without getting humans involved in the process at all. They negotiate purchases, and maybe even decide, entirely on their own, which toothpaste you’ll be using for the next few weeks.

It’s the ad industry reimagined for a world where people outsource their consumer choices to algorithms trained to optimize convenience over curiosity, and one that seems to fundamentally misunderstand that people love to shop. The phrase “retail therapy” exists for a reason, and I don’t think many people are going to willingly hand over a pleasurable experience to an AI assistant.

When you’re advertising to humans, you need to make emotional appeals. You need to convince a person that buying this specific product will solve their problems and improve their life. Traditional ads won’t cut it when your audience is an AI. Under this new philosophical shift, marketing is being reduced to something that, in essence, speaks and appeals to robots.

Here’s the tricky part: Google is still heavily reliant on the money it makes by advertising to humans. So they have to thread a needle, trying to keep money flowing from a decades-old business model while making a new one that appeals to AI.

It’s all a long way off, but Google doesn’t want to be left behind if AI agents become the primary consumers in a future digital economy that is completely different from the one we’re all familiar with.