The Web Is Splitting: Dopamine Thrives, Utility Rebundles

For a couple of decades, we treated the web as kind of a single product because it lived in a single interface: the browser. This interface bundled together two different functions, which felt unified because we accessed them the same way. That bundling is now ending.

What is breaking apart is not the web itself but the functions it served. One function was experiential: stimulation, emotion, identity, status. The other function was instrumental: answers, decisions, transactions. They coexisted together on the same pages, financed by same ad models and navigated with same clicks.

Now they are separating, each moving towards to the interface that suit it the best. They are Dopamine Web and Utility Web.

Dopamine Web

This is the experiential one, designed to entertain, outrage and to keep us addicted. This is where we scroll Instagram Reels and TikTok, watch YouTube, check X. This is about time spent, emotional response and habit formation. AI isn’t replacing dopamine web because we cannot automate the feeling of being entertained. This is being unbundled from the browser and distributed through native apps. Its incentives remain unchanged. Actually AI makes them even stronger by improving recommendation, personalisation and content supply. This part of the internet is alive and well.

Utility Web

This is part of the internet we use to get something done. We search, compare, read reviews, learn to fix things, book trips and buy stuff. Historically we navigated this web ourselves. We clicked links, scanned pages and tolerated banner ads and seo filler content as a tax on efficiency. This interface is dying. Not the data or services but the navigation. Thanks to AI chatbots and now AI agents, utility web is collapsing into the systems which now stand between the user and everything else.

The fundamental shift is not that AI is smarter but that AI doesn’t need to browse like we do. When you ask an agent to find a camera, it doesn’t visit a website in the same way we do. It ignores the banner ad, newsletter popups, emotional hooks. It queries, filters and selects.

Collapse of the Middle

This causes the Utility Web to collapse into, and to be rebundled within, a conversational or agentic interface. What used to be distributed across millions of sites gets recomposed into a single interaction layer. You do not visit ten different sites. You ask one system. You do not need to compare five options. You receive one recommendation that fit your unique circumstances the best. You do not generate impressions, you generate intent. This also changes what optimisation means. In this new utility web, SEO stops being mainly about persuasive, informational content written for humans and it becomes about machine legibility. Sites will increasingly exist to influence agents rather than humans.

This does not apply equally to everything. High risk decisions, regulated categories, and complex B2B purchases will likely retain human inspection and multi step evaluation. But for a large portion of everyday utility, the direction is clear. Navigation will disappear.

Therefore the impression, the atomic unit of commercial internet, loses relevance for majority of internet. This is a catastrophe for informational middle class; the blogs, review sites, niche publishers that all relied on human traffic.

Concentration of Power

As navigation disappears and utility rebundles inside a single interface, power concentrates. The Utility Web stops being a distributed network of destinations and becomes a narrow bottleneck of intent. Those controlling the recommendation layer control the power. Google and OpenAI are the obvious frontrunners here. Google is especially super well positioned to win. They are uniquely positioned to capture value from both sides of the split. Gemini defends their ownership of the Utility Web (the answer), while YouTube continues to remain one of the leaders of the Dopamine Web (the distraction). Google captures you whether you are working or wasting time.

Another player can still profit from both sides of the spectrum in different ways. Meta, which is already dominant in attention, is incentivised to integrate utility directly into its ecosystem. Meta owns the most valuable real estate on the Dopamine Web, that is Instagram. They are now realizing that utility doesn’t need to be a destination; it can be a layer. As their AI improves, you won’t need to leave Instagram to book a table or buy a shirt. The Utility Web will get absorbed into the feed and the friction of leaving the app will disappear. They will try to turn experienced attention into actionable intent, keeping the user in the app.

The Utility Web isn’t dying per se, it is becoming invisible or rather visible through another form, in a much less complicated and more compact interface. Websites will still exist, just as databases exist, but humans won’t visit them or at least not as much.

In a world without navigation, traffic is replaced by placement as the primary unit of value. Visibility inside the inference layer matters more than page views ever did. In such a world only two things compound:

Brand Awareness: do people know you exist?

Inference Preference: does AI choose you as the best answer?

More broadly, this changes how choice itself works. The open web trained users to deal with abundance of options through exploration and comparison. The agentic web trains them to delegate exploration and comparison entirely. What disappears is not information, but exposure. The chance to discover things and the freedom to be inefficient. As navigation disappears, the web gets compressed. Power concentrates around inference. In this system, being the primary answer is no longer a big advantage; it is the minimum requirement to exist.