Outside the window, it is the typical gloom of Shanghai in February. Raindrops fall like beads from a broken string, striking the glass without a sound. The temperature is only 8 degrees, as cold as that server room where hundreds of staff were laid off, leaving only a few dozen behind.
The hot latte in my hand is still steaming. I was just about to open that price comparison App I’ve used for five years to book a flight to Beijing, but my finger hovered over the screen and suddenly stopped.
(A soft chuckle)
I almost forgot, it is 2026.
I no longer need to click around in colorful interfaces like a diligent textile worker. I only need to say to the air: “Beijing next Wednesday, earliest flight, same rules as usual.”
0.3 seconds later, my private Agent has already completed the entire process in the background. Meanwhile, that App interface, which I may never open again, is quietly gathering dust in some corner of the world.
The Internet is still there, but to us—it has become “invisible.”
This is a quiet digital mass migration that is happening right now.
I. The Silent “Minority Report”
First, let me show you a piece of data that is bone-chillingly cold.
Just at the end of 2025, a watershed moment in global network traffic was crossed: AI-generated traffic surpassed human-generated traffic for the first time.
What does this mean? It means that on the Internet—this massive playground originally built to “connect people”—the number one player has changed to silicon-based lifeforms.
You scrolling through short videos, lurking in group chats, ordering food at midnight—these behaviors we thought were “mainstream Internet” have now been relegated to a “Minority Report.”
The true traffic overlords are those invisible Agents. They tirelessly scrape data while you sleep, compare prices and place orders for you while you are in meetings, and read the entirety of Ulysses while you are spacing out, only to toss you a three-line summary.
The surface layer of the Internet—that world full of carefully designed buttons, click-bait pop-ups, and colorful UIs—is peeling off like old paint.
Beneath the peeling paint lies the deep sea composed of machine-to-machine dialogue, “invisible” to the naked eye.
In this deep sea, the ruler used to measure value has broken.
For the past twenty years, we worshipped DAU (Daily Active Users) like a god. The logic was simple: you watch for one more minute, and I sell one more cent of advertising.
But now, the Agents are here.
Imagine a high-net-worth individual who wakes up his AI assistant only once a day: “Analyze competitor financial reports, write a brief, and book tickets to New York for next week.”
Aside from that sentence, he doesn’t touch his phone for the rest of the day. His DAU is 1.
But in the background? 20 Agents are instantly activated—scraping data, drawing charts, calling APIs to compare prices, filling out forms… The whole process consumes 500,000 Tokens.
The computing cost and commercial value generated by these 500,000 Tokens are equivalent to 100 ordinary users scrolling through short videos all day long.
This is why OpenAI stopped looking at DAU long ago; they are staring at TPD (Tokens Per Day).
Midjourney supports a $10 billion valuation with 80 people; Cursor generates $500 million in revenue with 250 people. You see, the trillion-dollar giants of the past were built on “headcount,” but now, elite special forces are leveraged by “compute.”
The attention economy is dead; compute leverage is eternal.
II. Tearing Down the Wall “For Humans”
Since Agents have become the big spenders, the Internet must change its rules and learn to serve the “Machine Overlords.”
Webpages used to be written for people to see, full of CSS styles, floating navigation, and animations. To AI, this is all noise.
It’s like asking AI to read a book, but the book is full of lace, stickers, and pop-up folds. To understand a simple “About Us” sentence, the AI has to tear off these messy decorations first, wasting 80% of its computing power in the process.
Thus, in 2026, the Internet began a “Demolition Movement.”
This chart does not show code conversion, but the Internet’s “makeup removal” process—from the heavy makeup of HTML for humans back to the bare-faced Markdown for machines.
Cloudflare, the global CDN giant, was the first to operate. They implemented “real-time translation” at the network edge: When your Agent visits a website, it no longer downloads that megabyte-sized HTML page, but directly shouts: “Give me the Markdown version!”
Cloudflare instantly strips away the fancy styles in the page, leaving only the skeleton of plain text.
Moreover, to let Agents “act” rather than just “look,” Google created the WebMCP protocol.
Previously, for AI to book a hotel, it had to simulate mouse clicks like a human, which was fragile as paper—if the website changed its layout or moved a button, the AI would go blind.
Now with WebMCP, websites directly expose their “operation interfaces.”
Tool Name: book-hotel
Input Parameters: Date, City, Number of People
Output Result: Order Number
When an Agent sees this code, it’s like a hungry wolf seeing meat; it pounces on it to call the function directly.
As for that exquisite UI the designer spent three all-nighters creating? (Shrugs) Sorry, the Agent didn’t even glance at it.
III. Funnel Collapse, The Wilderness of Zero Clicks
Since Agents can directly call interfaces to place orders, doesn’t the “traffic funnel” that traditional e-commerce worked so hard to build seem a bit… laughable?
Think back to your previous shopping process:
Search “Face Cream” -> Endure Ads -> Click into Details Page -> Look at Pictures -> Add to Cart -> This is the so-called “Funnel Model.” Every step leaks users; every step burns money.
Now?
You say to the AI: “Buy the face cream suitable for sensitive skin with the best reviews, under 500.”
Then, the transaction ends.
Your Agent directly read the brand’s structured data in the background, compared reviews across the entire web, and called the payment token.
Zero Click Commerce was born.
Forrester predicts that one-third of traditional retail pages will be abandoned. Because transactions between machines do not require visual display.
Now, brands are panicking. Previously, they spent money on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to rank first on Google or Baidu. Now that no human is even looking, and the Agent pays directly, how do you optimize?
Thus, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) became the life-saving straw.
Don’t stare at those complex metrics; this chart says only one thing: We used to please crawlers, now we please that “omniscient” brain.
SEO is about pleasing crawlers; GEO is about pleasing Large Language Models.
Previously you had to stack keywords; now you have to write content as “structured data,” and you have to lay out “consensus” on Reddit and Quora. Because only when AI discovers “multi-source consensus verification” across the web will it judge you as the “single correct answer.”
In this new game, if you cannot be understood by AI, you simply do not exist.
IV. Super Entrances and the Coralled Future
Sometimes I wonder, is there another kind of monopoly hiding behind this convenience?
The partners at YC, wearing lobster suits, talk about the “Agent Economy” on podcasts. Garry Tan asked that deafening question: “If your product isn’t designed for humans, but for Agents?”
This is indeed a good question, but the more terrifying question is: Who controls these Agents?
Look at the moves of these “giants” in China.
On Alibaba’s side, Tongyi Qianwen (Qwen) wants to take over all your “hands”—ordering food, booking tickets, hailing rides, all done with one command. During the Spring Festival, millions of elderly people completed food delivery orders “independently” for the first time. Sounds heartwarming, right?
On ByteDance’s side, Doubao wants to take over all your “eyes” and “mouths”—generating videos, editing, dubbing.
They are all doing the same thing: Locking users into their own closed loops.
The Internet used to be fragmented; we needed to jump between various Apps. Now, the Internet is turning into a few giant “black boxes.”
Super Agents have become the sole gatekeepers between humans and the digital world.
If the core value of an application is merely to serve as an interface for manual operation, it will likely die in the next few years. Replacing it will be those hidden high-speed networks based on JSON communication.
V. Finding Human Coordinates in Token Anxiety
This change is so fast it makes one hypoxic.
A new mental illness is spreading—”Token Anxiety.” We used to be anxious about unreturned messages; now we are anxious about not having enough Tokens, anxious about whether the Agent will suddenly go crazy when processing long contexts, anxious about whether it will sell my privacy to advertisers.
Even more cruel is that the digital divide is widening in an extremely hidden way.
Perhaps there will only be two classes in the future: “Commanders” who can write Prompts, and “Consumers” who only receive results.
The former owns hundreds or thousands of digital laborers that work 24 hours a day; the latter can only live on the “second-hand knowledge” chewed up and fed to them by AI.
So, when machines take over execution, take over price comparison, and even take over creation, what is left for humans?
(Bites into a donut, powdered sugar falls on the keyboard)
I think, probably only trust remains.
Professor Po-Shen Loh from Carnegie Mellon University was right: in an era where AI can do anything, “credibility” is the scarcest luxury.
Code can be written automatically, but who dares to be responsible for the bug that deletes the database? Plans can be generated automatically, but who dares to sign off on the decision that leads to a loss?
Agents can execute a perfect “How” for you ten thousand times, but only you can decide that unique “Why.”
The Internet is indeed “disappearing”; that shallow, visual surface web is drawing its curtains.
But as long as we still hold the final judgment, as long as we are still willing to take responsibility for the results, we will not be drowned in this silicon-based deep sea.
The rain seems to have stopped.
Stop just staring at your phone; occasionally look up and see this real world that hasn’t been datafied yet.
References:
- AI-Driven Bots Surpass Human Traffic – Bad Bot Report 2025
- Examining AI Agent Traffic: Powering the Shift to Agentic Commerce
- Cloudflare Enables Automatic HTML to Markdown
- GEO vs SEO: Everything to Know in 2025
- MCP-UI: The Future of Agentic Interfaces
—— Lyra Celest @ Turbulence τ
