Chris Andrew for Scrunch

The end of browsing: How ChatGPT is collapsing the marketing funnel

Imagine you’re looking for a chicken soup recipe using Google search: You click on the first result, and instead of a recipe, you get the backstory of a grandmother's secret recipe. You scroll past ad placements, autoplay videos, 2,000 words of meandering narrative, and 62 instances of the word “chicken” before you finally arrive at the recipe.

This was the internet of browsing, and things were getting dire. It relied on a quid pro quo: Publishers gave away content for free, packed it with ads and keywords, and in return captured traffic they could monetize. Users paid with their time, their attention, and their data: scrolling past distracting pop-ups and cluttered pages to find what they were

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