As of late 2025, the specific outcome Friedberg described has not occurred, but the prediction doesn’t have a clear time horizon, so it can’t be definitively scored as right or wrong yet.

What the prediction claimed
He argued that as AI answer engines mature, around 95% of low–value, marginal content sites in areas like self‑help and basic how‑to advice would “go away,” because users would instead get aggregated, synthesized answers directly from AI interfaces.

What we see today (Nov 2025)

1. AI answer engines have clearly “matured” and become mainstream.

   • Google’s AI Overviews (successor to SGE) now appear in over 50% of Google search results, up from ~25% just ten months earlier, and are heavily skewed toward informational queries. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • Consumer use of AI tools for search‑like tasks (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, etc.) has risen to ~38% of users in some markets, with ChatGPT alone counted among the most visited sites globally. (en.wikipedia.org)
     This broadly matches the “AI answer engines” environment he envisioned.

2. AI and Google updates have hurt many low‑value content sites, but not wiped out ~95% of them.

   • Google’s March 2024 “helpful content” and spam updates targeted low‑quality, unoriginal, and mass‑produced AI content, aiming to remove around 40% of such material from search results; later analysis suggests roughly a 45% reduction of low‑quality/unoriginal content in SERPs. (samblogs.com)
   • A study of Google’s March 2024 update found that 837 of 49,345 monitored sites were completely deindexed in early stages—hundreds of sites, not anything close to 95% of a whole niche. (searchenginejournal.com)
   • Analyses of deindexed sites show many had very high proportions of AI‑generated content and aggressive ads—again indicating a culling of some spammy/low‑value sites rather than near‑total extinction. (originality.ai)

3. AI summaries are clearly siphoning traffic from publishers, but sites largely still exist.

   • SimilarWeb data show that after AI Overviews rolled out, news‑related zero‑click searches on Google rose from 56% to 69%, and organic traffic to news sites fell from over 2.3B monthly visits to under 1.7B between mid‑2024 and May 2025. (nypost.com)
   • Reports and complaints by publisher groups in the US and EU describe substantial traffic and revenue declines, and some individual businesses (like Chegg) explicitly blame AI search features for subscriber and traffic loss, leading to layoffs and lawsuits. (reuters.com)
     These are serious impacts, but they show declining traffic and monetization, not that most how‑to / self‑help sites have vanished.

4. The overall number of websites is roughly stable or growing, not collapsing by 95%.

   • Multiple industry summaries estimate roughly 1.1–1.2 billion websites worldwide in 2025, with around 190–260 million active sites—similar active‑site levels to 2020–2023. (grabon.com)
   • The web continues to add ~250,000 new websites per day, and tens of millions of new domains yearly. (grabon.com)
     There is no sign that 95% of self‑help/how‑to publishers have disappeared; if anything, generative AI has increased the supply of low‑effort content in many niches. Economic pressure and deindexing are real, but they fall well short of the near‑total wipe‑out he envisioned.

Assessment

• On the mechanism, he was directionally right: AI answer engines and Google’s AI Overviews are now major interfaces for informational queries and are measurably reducing click‑through to many content sites, especially low‑value or duplicative ones. (en.wikipedia.org)
• On the magnitude and endpoint—“95% of these content publishers…go away” as a result—available data don’t support this. The total number of websites has not collapsed, and while many low‑value sites have lost visibility or revenue and some have been deindexed, that is nowhere near a 95% disappearance of self‑help/how‑to style sites.

Because Friedberg didn’t specify a time frame (e.g., “by 2025” or “within five years”), we can’t yet say the prediction is definitively false; the structural transition he described could continue for the rest of the decade. As of late 2025, though, the core quantitative claim (≈95% of such sites disappearing) has not come true, and the evidence so far points to substantial attrition and consolidation rather than near‑total extinction—hence the status **“inconclusive (too early)” rather than clearly right or clearly wrong.