Blueprint for survival: Fan argues that survival won’t come from tweaks, it will require a rebuild. "We're pivoting to a world of content-agent interaction, not content-user interaction," she says. "Creators have to ask what they need to do to facilitate content discovery where the audience is no longer a human, but an AI agent." That shift demands new infrastructure, from agent-optimized content design to payment rails that don’t rely on human clicks. Fan also points to micropayments as a missing piece: "Is this the moment that cryptocurrency actually comes back in a real, practical way?"

The final piece is a new reporting layer for observability and verification. "How do you prove value in this new world?" Fan asks. "If I'm a brand paying for a campaign on your application, I need to see some performance." Without traditional tracking methods, publishers and platforms will need to invent a new, generalized reporting layer built for observability in an agent-driven ecosystem.

Pop the bubble: For Fan, this isn’t just a technical challenge. It’s a societal one. "As a society, we need objective voices and diversified content streams. The alternative is a future where we all live in our own 'informational bubble,' and it's critical that the tech community steps up to build the tools to prevent that."

But even the best tools aren't enough without scrutiny. "I keep reminding myself that once you get comfortable with an agent, you stop checking it," she warns. "This is what makes expertise and domain knowledge even more important. We cannot blindly trust the information fed to us."