The Web Used to Be Ours

I built my first web page by hand. No builder, no template, no plugin. Just a text file full of angle brackets, a free hosting account, and the particular thrill of typing a URL and watching my own words appear on a screen that anyone in the world could reach.

It was ugly. The background was a tiled texture that made the text nearly impossible to read. There was a hit counter at the bottom that I checked obsessively. There was an animated “under construction” sign that stayed up for about two years because the site was always under construction. There was a guestbook. People I’d never met signed it.

That web is gone. Not declining. Gone. I want to talk about what replaced it. The replacement is selling you something. And the thing it took from you is harder to get back than most people realize.

What was the early web like?

In the late nineties and into the early two-thousands, people built the web. Brands and content teams arrived later, once somebody figured out there was money in it.

GeoCities organized itself into neighborhoods. You picked a category that matched what your site was about and you got dropped in with thousands of other amateurs doing the same thing. Webrings linked sites by topic, so you could click “next” and tumble through a chain of pages all made by individuals who cared about the same weird thing you did. You found sites because a real human linked to them, not because a ranking algorithm decided you should.

It was chaos. Half the links were dead. Search barely worked. Most pages looked like a ransom note assembled by someone who had just discovered the blink tag. I’m not going to pretend it was well-built, because it wasn’t. But it was ours. The default unit of the web was a person with something to say and a free afternoon. The motive was expression. Nobody was optimizing a funnel. Nobody was capturing a lead. People published because they had something they wanted to put into the world, and the world could find it.

The tiled backgrounds can go. What’s worth mourning is that an individual was the normal case.

How did money change the internet?

Then the web got valuable, and value attracts money, and money changes everything it touches.

Discovery moved from human links to search rankings.

That sounds neutral until you understand what it did. When a real person links to your site, they’re vouching for it. When an algorithm ranks your site, it’s scoring you against everyone else competing for the same words, and the people who win that competition are the ones who can pay to win it. Content farms. Brands with SEO budgets. Companies that treat being found as a line item.

The individual can’t out-resource that. You write one honest article about a subject you know cold, and it lands on page fifteen, behind nine corporate pages that are worse than yours but optimized harder. Page fifteen doesn’t exist.

Nobody scrolls to page fifteen. You may as well have published it on a napkin and left it in a drawer.

And the platforms finished the job. Why would you hand-build a site when Facebook would give you a page for free? Why learn HTML when Medium would host your writing and promise you an audience?

So people stopped owning their corners of the web and started renting space on someone else’s. Your writing became a profile. Your audience became a number that the platform owned and could throttle whenever it wanted to sell you reach back.

The platforms are where I get angry. They filled their pages with free writing from millions of people, then started charging those same people to reach readers who had already chosen to follow them. Writers built those audiences, and the platforms kept the keys.

I’m not interested in pretending individuals got wiped out completely.

People still break through, but look at how: through Substack, through YouTube, through LinkedIn, through platforms that take a cut and set the rules and can change them on you Tuesday morning with no warning. The open web stopped being the place where a person could be found. The venue moved indoors, and the building has a landlord.

What does AI search do to individual visibility?

I spend my working life on this problem now, so let me tell you where it goes next, because it’s worse and almost nobody is talking about it.

Search buried the individual under a pile of better-funded competitors. At least the pile existed. At least there was a page fifteen to be buried on. AI answer engines don’t give you a page fifteen. You ask the machine a question and it hands back an answer, and that answer names whoever it already knows about. There’s no scrolling past the brands to find you. There’s just the answer, and you’re either in it or you don’t exist.

And what gets an entity into that answer is corroboration. The machine surfaces things it can verify across many sources. A corporation has thousands of corroborating mentions: press, directories, partnerships, profiles, citations stacked up over years.

A single person with one website has almost none. The wall that SEO built is tall. The wall AI builds is taller, and it’s built against the under-corroborated individual, which means against exactly the kind of person the old web was made of. (More on Reddit’s login wall)

I’ve got nothing against the machines themselves. What I object to is an answer engine that can only see the people who could afford to be seen, because that decides whose knowledge counts. A retired engineer who knows one narrow subject better than anybody alive shouldn’t lose to a brand with a bigger press budget, and everybody who’d have learned from that engineer loses too.

I tested this on myself. I asked five different AI systems to describe me on the same day. They disagreed with each other. One invented a book I never wrote and put my name on it. Another started writing an answer and then erased it mid-sentence, as if it had thought better of admitting it knew anything. These systems are powerful and they’re arbitrary, and they’re merciless toward anyone who hasn’t spent real effort making themselves verifiable. The amateur with a good page and no corroboration is invisible to them.

What is the real loss beyond traffic?

It’s easy to make this about traffic and rankings, because those are measurable. But the real loss isn’t measurable, and that’s why it gets ignored.

The fun is dying. The weird personal corners. The sense that a human being made the thing you’re looking at, for reasons that had nothing to do with converting you into a customer. The serendipity of clicking “next” on a webring and landing somewhere you’d never have searched for. None of that survives optimization. You can’t optimize your way to a soul.

The web is being polished into a business surface. Every page built to convert. Every word working for a funnel. Efficient, monetized, and about as interesting to wander through as a strip mall. It works. It just isn’t a place anybody visits for the joy of it anymore, and a web that exists only to sell is a web that stopped being for humans somewhere along the way.

How does an individual stay visible on today’s web?

I could end there, on the elegy, and a lot of people would nod. But nodding isn’t useful, and I’m not built for endings that just feel sad and stop. The individual isn’t dead. But visibility, which the old web handed out for free to anyone with an afternoon and an idea, is now something you have to build on purpose. That’s the change. It used to be a birthright. Now it’s a skill.

So you build a home base you own, instead of renting yourself out to a platform that can evict you. You build corroboration across the web on purpose, so the machines can verify that you’re real and the search engines have something to rank that you control. You treat being findable as a thing you construct, brick by deliberate brick, because nobody is going to hand it to you the way they handed it to a teenager with a GeoCities account in 1999.

I do this for a living and I do it for myself.

Self-owned sites. An identity stitched together across the web so the algorithms and the answer engines can confirm I exist. It’s work that didn’t used to be necessary, and that it’s necessary now is exactly the loss I’ve been describing. But it can be done. A person can still carve out a place. The carving is just harder than it was, and you have to mean it.

The old web’s promise was simple. Anyone could put something into the world, and someone who cared would find it. That promise isn’t gone. It just stopped being free. Keeping it alive now takes intention, and stubbornness, and a refusal to disappear into a platform that would rather you were a profile than a person.

I’m keeping mine. Build yours.

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From the author

The Day Your Website Died
Visibility is now a skill you build on purpose. The Day Your Website Died is my book on optimizing for AI search, written after I watched the shape of my own traffic change.