The Walrus Essay: 'AI-Eats-the-Web' Is Erasing the Internet's Archival Memory as Wikipedia and Wayback Traffic Collapse

Vass Bednar's essay argues that AI-generated summaries and answer engines are eroding the archival substrate the web is built on: Wikipedia traffic is collapsing as AI systems ingest its content without sending readers, and Internet Archive litigation has blunted Wayback's fail-safe backup role. She frames information infrastructure as a public utility worth building sovereign alternatives to, pointing to France's Qwant as a template.