The open web is not disappearing because publishing has become impossible; it is disappearing because discovery is being absorbed into vendor specific information environments. Google is the central case because of its dominance in web search, but the pattern is broader: crawlers, indexes, operating systems, browsers, assistants, DNS resolvers, VPNs, advertising systems, and policy processes are converging into private gardens that present themselves as the web. Findability inside these gardens depends less on public availability than on compatibility with their measurement, monetization, legal, and editorial machinery. Once LLMs train on and retrieve through those filtered layers, exclusion no longer affects only search traffic; it shapes the corpus from which future answers are generated.
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