In her latest Forbes column, Grove Ventures Managing Partner and Forbes contributor Renana Ashkenazi explores a milestone that could reshape the future of the internet: for the first time, automated traffic has surpassed human traffic, accounting for 53% of all web traffic
She argues that this shift challenges one of the internet’s foundational assumptions. For decades, websites monetized human attention through advertising. But AI agents search, compare, evaluate, and transact differently.
As she writes, “The business model that paid for the web assumed someone was looking, but increasingly, no one is.”
As AI agents become a larger share of internet traffic, the implications extend far beyond web analytics. How content is discovered, how websites are monetized, and how companies reach customers may all need to evolve. Ashkenazi points to early examples already emerging across the ecosystem, from Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl model to Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines and Visa’s agentic checkout efforts.
The article ultimately argues that the economics of the internet are beginning to shift. As AI agents take on a larger role in discovery, commerce, and decision-making, value may increasingly move away from attention and toward access. As Ashkenazi puts it, the web’s business model is moving “from a billboard to a tollbooth״.
Read the full article by Renana Ashkenazi here.
