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AI to Take Over Traffic as Advertising Makes Frantic Last Stand
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- DeepHorus
Recently, tech giant Elon Musk tweeted on a social platform, citing and endorsing a report published by internet infrastructure giant Cloudflare. The report predicts that in the near future, the vast majority of internet traffic will no longer be actively generated by humans, but will instead be automatically created in the background by artificial intelligence (AI) and agents. This means future internet traffic will multiply compared to now, but the bulk of it will occur through covert interactions between agents and agents, servers and servers, with humans no longer needing to personally perform searches, reading, or placing orders.
However, this technological vision stands in stark and absurd contrast to the current state of the internet advertising industry. On one hand, the tech world is striving to develop highly advanced artificial general intelligence (AGI), aiming to free humans from screens. On the other hand, traditional internet commercial forces are trapped in a kind of "end-times revelry" anxiety. In the AI era, traffic logic will fundamentally change: when agents can automatically complete tasks like price comparison and booking, the foundation of traditional advertisingâthe "eyeball economy" based on human attentionâwill suffer a massive drain.
Without human eyes watching, even the most sophisticated advertising algorithms will become ineffective. This unprecedented anxiety is driving advertising to desperately "counterattack" from the digital world back into the physical world and underlying operating systems. For example, the German luxury brand BMW recently sparked public controversy by pushing movie advertisements to car owners after a vehicle system update. Previously, BMW had publicly promised not to use the central control screen for marketing, a move users saw as an intrusion into their "private space."
Similar encroachments are occurring on other smart devices. Streaming and hardware manufacturer Roku was granted a patent in 2024 for "HDMI custom ad insertion." This technology can monitor pauses on external devices (such as game consoles) and directly insert advertisements at the TV hardware level, even if the user isn't using the TV's own operating system. Although the patent faced strong opposition and was declared a technical reserve, it reveals hardware manufacturers' ambition to vie for advertising entry points.
At the operating system level, Microsoft embeds "recommended apps" and information feed advertisements in key areas of Windows, such as the "Start" menu and lock screen, requiring users to delve into settings menus to manually disable them. In the domestic Android phone market, pre-installed lock screen, wallpaper, and desktop information feed services take advertising penetration to the extreme, with every screen activation bombarding users with various subtle visual stimuli and promotional content.
Even AI products, seen as the future direction, are themselves facing the predicament of advertising erosion. Due to high computing costs and revenue pressures, platforms have to carve out ad spaces within AI-generated content. For instance, Google's "AI Overviews" feature directly stitches sponsored ads into AI-generated answers. AI startup Perplexity has introduced a "sponsored follow-up" design, allowing brands to bid for "positions" that guide users to ask follow-up questions in a conversation, converting user curiosity into a marketing channel.
Currently, the internet industry is at such a contradictory crossroads: on one side, AI agents promise a future of "no-eyes traffic," signaling the end of old advertising models; on the other, advertising, in order to squeeze out humans' remaining attention, is launching a "doomsday counterattack" in an all-pervasive manner. From car infotainment systems to TV interfaces, from operating systems to AI conversations themselves, the digital labyrinth and physical world advertising intrusions faced by users are becoming increasingly complex and inescapable.
