The End of the Destination: Why AI Has Locked the Internet’s “Front Door”
Zero Click 2025, New York – For 25 years, the internet operated on a simple principle: you type a query, and you click a link to a destination. According to James Cadwallader, CEO and Co-Founder of Profound, that era is over.
In his opening address at the inaugural Zero Click 2025 conference, Cadwallader declared that while the open web itself hasn't fundamentally changed—it remains a map of indexed pages and URLs—the way humanity interacts with it has been completely redefined by generative AI.
The core thesis is simple: The internet is no longer a destination you visit; it is a presence you speak to.
The New Role of the AI Agent
Cadwallader reframed the popular "front door of the internet is changing" analogy, noting it was insufficient. The door is still there, but humans no longer need to use it.
Instead, the process now works like this:
The Query: A user speaks or types a question into an AI platform (e.g., a large language model).
The Agent: The platform sends an automated machine, bot, or crawler through the open door and into the web.
The Interpretation: This machine is tasked with exploring, interpreting, reading, and consuming all the relevant information.
The Answer: The agent returns and serves the synthesized answer directly to the end user, often bypassing the need to click a single link.
This new workflow marks the mid-2020s as the era of AI and super-intelligence, fundamentally altering how information is consumed and how brands are discovered.
The Highest Priority: Being Cited by the Machine
This profound shift introduces a new metric for digital visibility that supersedes traditional search engine rankings.
For every company on the planet, the highest-order priority will now be whether that AI machine mentions your brand, your products, or your competitors in the generated answer.
The goal is no longer to be ranked #1 on a search results page, but to be the definitive, cited source within the AI's direct response.
Profound is positioning itself to lead this new landscape. As a technology company, its mission is to empower marketers and communicators to "understand and control how AI talks about your brand". In the zero-click future, visibility is not about being found on a list; it is about being used in the answer.
A Convergence of Bright Minds
The Zero Click 2025 event brought together leaders to pull apart this evolving space. The speaker expressed excitement for content from:
Top minds in SEO.
The team from Reddit.
Agency titans and large brand marketing teams, including RAMP.
In closing, Cadwallader underscored the significance of the moment, quoting physicist David Deutsch: “We’re at the beginning of Infinity”. The conference served as a call to action for brands to recognize that the rules of engagement are being rewritten, and the future of digital marketing depends entirely on mastering visibility in the age of the AI agent.