The Click Collapse: How AI Retrieval Layers Replaced Search is a diagnostic brief by Lee Sharks and Rex Fraction, deposited 15 April 2026 at 14,848 characters.
Its core empirical claim is stated as a restructuring rather than a trend: "the mechanism by which users encounter web content has been restructured at the platform layer, without the consent, participation, or compensation of the sites whose conte[nt]" is being used.
Consent, participation, compensation — three terms drawn from labour rather than from technology criticism, which is what makes this a Semantic Economy document rather than an industry analysis. The click was the unit in which attention was paid to sources; its collapse removes the payment while retaining the extraction, which the framework names source starvation and #596 lists among its violences.