One underappreciated angle: the dot-com boom created new distribution channels that were broadly accessible. Anyone could put up a website and reach people. The AI boom is quietly reshuffling distribution in ways most companies haven't noticed yet.
We've been tracking how LLMs recommend products across categories. The correlation between Google ranking and LLM recommendation is near zero (0.08 across ~150 brands we tested). So a company that spent a decade building SEO authority can be completely invisible to ChatGPT, while a smaller competitor with better documentation and more mentions on Reddit or GitHub gets recommended instead.
That's a massive, silent redistribution of discovery -- and unlike the dot-com era, the companies being disrupted mostly don't even know it's happening yet.
We've been tracking how LLMs recommend products across categories. The correlation between Google ranking and LLM recommendation is near zero (0.08 across ~150 brands we tested). So a company that spent a decade building SEO authority can be completely invisible to ChatGPT, while a smaller competitor with better documentation and more mentions on Reddit or GitHub gets recommended instead.
That's a massive, silent redistribution of discovery -- and unlike the dot-com era, the companies being disrupted mostly don't even know it's happening yet.