Return my Web 1.0 to me

# Return My Web 1.0

Who benefits from the death of search, and can the old cozy internet unexpectedly become a form of resistance.

The internet is gradually ceasing to be a space for people and is becoming infrastructure for digital agents. The media are losing their audience, websites — their raison d’être, and knowledge is turning into an impersonal synthesis created by someone else’s algorithms. Why might “ten blue links” turn out to be the last symbol of the human web—who benefits from the death of search, and can the old cozy internet suddenly become a form of resistance? Let’s look at it together with ForkLog.

Evolution of the internet or user degradation?

It’s hard not to notice how rapidly the digital environment is changing with the development of artificial intelligence and the arrival of the Web 3.0 era. Not long ago, internet users mostly acted as authors and commentators. Now some of them are still on social media and periodically ask: “Hey, does anyone see my posts? If yes, react to anything” or “People! Where did everyone go, why is my feed only filled with content generated by bots?”. Gone are the days when you could type a few words into the search bar and spend several days following links and reading something more or less meaningful on the topics you care about.

The new internet kills our sense of adventurous spirit; we stop feeling like pioneers, researchers, detectives, seekers of truth. We no longer spend hours of working time sorting through and consuming gigabytes of information in the hope of stumbling upon something useful. People online talk to language models. And they get identical, standardized, and meager answers in a ready-made package—although usually not in the best form.

Ideologues and marketers presented Web 3.0, metaverses, and AI as technologies that liberate human beings. Now we’re at a stage where the user has already been turned into a customer. But it seems the day isn’t far off when we’ll see a truly post-human internet. Against this backdrop, a question arises that almost feels nostalgic: could the new hero be someone who manages to build yet another internet—something roughly like it was in the early 2000s?

Let’s clarify that in this article we touch on Web 3.0 and, to a lesser extent, Web3. Although these concepts represent different approaches, both are aimed at creating a more advanced internet, offering their own ways to solve pressing problems of the modern network. Web3 emphasizes returning control over data and digital identity to users through blockchain technologies, while Web 3.0 focuses on increasing the intelligence and efficiency of the internet by reusing and interlinking machine-readable data across the network.

R.I.P. ten blue links

At the Google I/O 2026 conference, the company effectively made it clear: search results from queries will no longer be just a directory of links. In the IT giant’s official blog, it says that AI Mode has already become the most powerful search mode and has surpassed the mark of 1 billion monthly users. And if earlier Google Search answered based on the principle of “which pages fit the query,” now it does so based on interpreting “what exactly the person wanted to learn and how best to explain it.”

“We are integrating advanced capabilities of our model into search through new AI-powered features that enable agents by simply asking a question. We are also introducing a new AI-based search interface field, which is the most significant update in more than 25 years,” — said Google Search Vice President Elizabeth Reid.

The global tech corporation has already handled everything for you and introduced the concept of search AI agents. The company’s release assures that “you will be able to easily create, configure, and manage multiple AI agents to solve a wide range of tasks right within search.” Nothing seems wrong—at least not yet—until you find yourself under the control of invisible minions, who work for you. But in the next paragraph of the release, it says the following:

“With informational agents, you will always be aware of everything that matters most to you. Your agent will intelligently analyze everything available on the internet, including blogs, news sites, and social media posts, as well as our latest data—such as real-time information on finance, shopping, and sports—to track changes related to your specific question.”

So you’ve already been cut off from the analysis. And the question arises: “Are you saying you’ll be the one doing it for me?”

Now we have a “search engine with executive brains,” inside of which AI agents don’t just look for information—they themselves formulate clarifying queries, collect results, rank them, and deliver a ready-made answer or action. The user makes a request in natural language, almost like a human: long phrases, with context, clarifications, and follow-up questions. Unlike the former mode of “keywords — a list of links,” this search tries to keep the dialogue, remember previous messages, and respond not with fragments but with a coherent explanation. Yes, the machine chews the information for us.

This shift aligns with broader market dynamics: according to Ahrefs, the presence of AI Overviews correlates with a 34.5 percent decline in average CTR. Later analytics from Search Engine Land and Seer Interactive show that when answers are generated by AI, organic clickable traffic can drop by already dozens of percent, and users as a whole click less even outside such blocks.

Against this backdrop, Google’s search system is clearly transforming from a navigation interface into a layer of interpretation and delegation. One of the first areas to feel the impact was the media. Their task in interacting with platforms is changing: it’s no longer about getting into the results; it’s about becoming a source that the system uses when forming an answer. AI Mode poses risks for publishers primarily of losing traffic, weakening the brand, and becoming dependent on someone else’s interpretation of their content. When a user receives a ready-made answer inside the Google interface, they click on original materials less often—meaning editorial teams lose both visits and ad impressions, as well as the ability to keep readers on their own platform.

Now Google fully decides which sources to show, how to summarize them, and in what format it provides the answer, while the media effectively become suppliers of raw material for someone else’s product. For journalism, this means losing control and influence.

At the same time, an infrastructure of digital commercial agents (agentic commerce) is being formed online. The open Agentic Commerce Protocol already describes how they will be able to make purchases, transfer payment tokens, and act on behalf of the buyer.

The problem with a radical change in search goes much deeper than SEO metrics and the fact that websites become useless because they don’t make it into the results. When synthesis is done by a machine, the question of what sources it is based on shifts from the technical realm to the political. Especially when internet decentralization, for various reasons, did not happen.

Google, buy me a hat

The balance of power among web users has truly changed in 30 years. Those who used the web primarily as a dumping ground for sources of all kinds of information are now out of luck; the likelihood of finding nuggets of gold and diamonds in tons of hyperlinks is practically zero. Centralized Web 2.0 not only took over your data, but also became a big mom who takes care of you—caringly and lovingly—saying: “Eat what you’re given!”

Content authors clogged the internet with their output—priceless opinions, advice, and the simulation of conversation—to the point that they stopped reading even themselves. LiveJournal died—so what, Twitter will die too, that is, X. Everyone has already gotten fed up with social media, regularly goes on digital detoxes and rehab, and starts reading paper books again! These are the children of that same Web 2.0 mom, who feel they’ve been tricked, but still cling to some kind of their own agency—creating channels on Telegram—but can’t tell anything new or interesting there, because it’s no longer the kind of thing that gets googled.

Don’t mistake the above for old-age grumbling. It wasn’t users who ruined the internet, and bloggers aren’t to blame either. The internet has simply become too big for a human way of navigating it. A real need for system change has formed.

And who do we become—potential Web 3.0 clients? Buyers. But not like in a market, where you look and sniff before deciding to make a deal. The modern internet trains us to be the ideal customer: instead of searching for goods ourselves and performing transactions ourselves, we set a goal, and an AI agent takes over searching, comparing, choosing, and paying.

The user gives a text or voice command, for example: “Buy the cheapest flights to Rome for the weekend, a hotel no more than 100 euros per day, Wi-Fi required.” The AI agent independently scans marketplaces, booking sites, and aggregators. It either proposes a ready option for approval or immediately places the order using the user’s linked payment details.

Robots also work on the selling side. What is a person doing at this time? Do they have free time for art, sciences, philosophy? In utopia—yes. In reality, without the ability and necessity to analyze, search, cross-check, and verify, representatives of our kind will quickly lose these skills. On top of that, the explanatory interface of new search engines inevitably expresses someone’s selection logic—and therefore imposes a certain worldview.

If Web 1.0 gave access to information, and Web 2.0 forced everyone to produce it, then Web 3.0 will free human beings from the need to interact with it at all. What are writers, journalists, editors, researchers, and readers supposed to do with a system in which the very principle of search has been “broken”?

It seems that a counter-web is needed—another space where sources will still matter more than a synthesized answer to questions, and where verification, accuracy, accessibility, and diversity of information will remain more valuable than speed. And here, “the old web” can become not a comfort for the nostalgia of old-timers, not a rollback to the past, but a model of resistance and a new competitive environment.

Simple, link-based, manageable

In the early web, there was more fragmentation, and there was no total packing of information into one answer. Yes, for some it was less convenient. But the ability to carry out research on your own, see sources, follow links, compare versions, acquire knowledge, and produce something new—that’s what you could love about Web 1.0: cozy, warm, and lamp-lit.

Is that enough of a foundation to think, in cultural, ideological, and economic terms, about creating an alternative “new old internet”? Quite possibly. And many people have not only started thinking about it, but also begun to do something in the direction of moving away from centralization, platforms, advertising, and bots.

The more actively digital agents will act instead of us, the more valuable a web designed specifically for human attention will become. In academic, legal, scientific, and analytical environments, the demand for verifiable, independent sources will grow as mass search continues to develop in the direction of AI-generated answers. And this is another reason to develop what we above conditionally called the counter-web. It’s better to do this without falling into romanticizing the old internet. We need to be clear that a return to Web1.0 cannot be literal, and it would hardly be desirable in its full form.

A counterculture of life outside platforms and AI search already exists. Right now, it is represented by several movements: IndieWeb, Small Web, Cozy Web, and less well-known but close-in-spirit ones. While these initiatives do not yet constitute a “new internet” in an infrastructural sense, they are trying to bring the web back to a human scale: personal domains, small sites, direct links, manual navigation, and the author’s control over their own content. The existence of such efforts confirms the existence of a demand for alternative web models and looks like an economic argument in favor of creating them.

At the same time, a return to Web 1.0 is unlikely to become a mass scenario. Most users will always choose convenience, speed, and delegation. AI agents do save time and eliminate routine. But precisely because of that, the human internet might become a new form of “luxury”—a space free from algorithmic noise, endless recommendations, and automated content. Not the main big internet, but something like a digital preserve.