Bye-Bye Clicks! AI Agents Are Running the Web Now

The browser wars of the 1990s and 2000s fought over speed, rendering standards, and market share. Today, a new and far more complex battle has begun: we are moving away from the traditional web, where users visit websites, toward the “agentic web,” where AI intermediates every interaction.

At Web Summit 2025, Mozilla CEO Laura Chambers and Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince joined Mike Butcher from PreFounders to dissect this transition.

Their conversation revealed a stark reality – the way we consume information is fundamentally changing, and without new rules, the economic model of the internet could collapse. As Chambers put it, we must ensure “the web doesn’t become siloed or closed off” during this massive shift.

Welcome to the new web where AI browses and we chill

For decades, a browser acted as a simple container. You typed a URL, the browser fetched the content, and you read it. Chambers argues that this era is ending:

I think we’re moving from a world where browsers are simple containers. We are entering a phase of agentic activity where “the browser, or the AI agent inside it, takes action on our behalf.”

Prince views this as a massive platform shift, comparable to the transition from desktop to mobile. He predicts that in the near future, personal AI agents will handle the majority of information retrieval and commerce.

While this promises efficiency, it fundamentally breaks the relationship between creators and consumers. “AI is the next platform shift,” Prince stated. “In the future, the way people interact with information will be through their personal AI agent.”

Houston, we’ve got a “vampire bot” problem

The most immediate danger lies in how AI browsers interact with publishers. Prince highlighted a growing trend where AI agents overstep boundaries. A user might ask an AI browser to read one article from The New York Times. The agent visits the site to fulfill the request but acts aggressively. Prince described the behavior:

They’ll read the specific article the user asked for but then they’ll also scrape everything published on that site that day.

This behavior undermines the business model of journalism. Publishers rely on human traffic, subscriptions, and ad impressions. If an AI scrapes the content and summarizes it for the user, the original creator receives zero value. Prince warns that if AI companies consume content without contributing to the ecosystem, they will destroy the very data sources they need to survive. “If AI scrapes everything behind the paywall and redistributes it,” Prince warned, “the entire system breaks.”

Users put privacy first, don’t they?

Users claim to value privacy, yet they almost always choose convenience. Chambers noted that while Mozilla builds privacy-by-design into Firefox, the average user prioritizes a frictionless experience over data protection:

Unfortunately, what we typically see is that users choose convenience. They choose simplicity over privacy even when they say they value privacy.

This creates a dangerous feedback loop. If the most convenient AI tools are also the most invasive, users will surrender their data without a second thought. Chambers believes the solution lies in “optionality.” Browsers must allow users to choose between a classic, private experience and an AI-enhanced one.

However, Prince suggests that users no longer care about original sources. Data from Cloudflare shows a sharp decline in click-through rates for users of AI tools like Anthropic and OpenAI. “Younger users especially aren’t opening 10 blue links,” Prince noted. “They want the answer, not the process.” The “ten blue links” of a Google search are becoming artifacts of the past.

The browser can act as a trusted middleman

If users demand AI, how do we protect privacy? Prince proposed a novel role for independent browsers like Firefox. He argues that the browser should act as a trusted intermediary between the user and the AI model:

I want to type something into a trusted intermediary, and have it figure things out.

In this scenario, the browser holds the user’s context and memory. When a user asks a question, the browser anonymizes the data, converts it into mathematical vectors, and sends it to the best available model (whether that is OpenAI, Gemini, or Anthropic). The AI provider receives the math needed to answer the query but never learns the user’s identity. “You can encode that as math,” Prince explained, noting that the data becomes “irreversible but meaningful enough for the model to do its job.”

This approach positions organizations like Mozilla and Apple as vital gatekeepers. They can verify that a request comes from a real human without revealing who that human is. This “proof of humanity” will become the most valuable currency on an internet flooded with bots.

The “click” is dying

The current trajectory of the web favors a monopoly where one or two AI giants control all information flow. Both CEOs agree that this is a dystopian outcome. A healthy internet requires diversity, where small businesses and independent publishers can still thrive. “A good future isn’t one with only five AI companies,” Prince declared. “It’s one with tens of thousands.”

Cloudflare intends to enforce rules that penalize bad actors who scrape content aggressively. Meanwhile, Mozilla continues to maintain its own engine, Gecko, to ensure that commercial interests do not solely dictate web standards. Chambers insisted:

We need the voice of the people represented in these conversations

The business model of the internet is about to change. The “click” is dying. The challenge for the next five years is to invent a new economic system that rewards creators in an age where AI answers every question. If we fail to do so, the open web may simply disappear inside a chatbot’s dialogue box. As Prince concluded, “We must find a way for publishers to continue earning revenue.”