AI models are killing the internet's business, says Cloudflare CEO
Cloudflare's CEO, Matthew Prince, says AI models are changing the way websites earn money.
Instead of real people visiting sites (which drives ads and subscriptions), AIs just scrape content and reuse it—while sending dramatically fewer visitors back to creators.
This shift means creators might stop getting paid for their work unless new ways to support them are found.
Human eyeball traffic is going away
Cloudflare, which handles a big chunk of global web traffic, has noticed a huge drop in user visits from major tech companies.
For example, Google now sends just one visitor for every 30 pages scraped by its bots.
OpenAI and Anthropic's numbers are even more dramatic—OpenAI about one visitor per 37,000 pages scraped, and Anthropic about one per 500,000.
As Prince puts it, the human eyeball traffic is going away and we need to figure out a new business model to compensate creators.