Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, recently expressed concerns regarding the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the web’s business model. In an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, he stated that AI is fundamentally altering the economic framework that has dominated the internet for the last 15 years, primarily through search engines like Google. He explained that the traditional value exchange between Google and content creators has deteriorated significantly. Prince highlighted how the dynamics have shifted over the years.

A decade ago, for every two web pages Google scraped, they would provide one visitor back to the site. Now, that ratio has worsened, requiring six pages scraped to generate just one visitor. This alteration in traffic allocation has contributed to the rise of zero-click searches, whereby users receive answers directly on Google’s search results page, bypassing the original website altogether. Furthermore, Prince believes that AI exacerbates the challenges created by this shifting landscape.

He pointed out that AI companies scrape a far greater amount of content, yielding significantly less value to content creators in return. For example, he cited that the ratio of content utilized to user engagement for some AI companies is around 250 to one or even 6,000 to one. This trend jeopardizes the sustainability of original content creation on the web. Prince emphasized the urgent need for guidelines or regulations governing content scraping by AI companies.

He argued that simply extracting content without offering any form of compensation is unsustainable. Cloudflare, which reportedly supports a significant portion of AI companies and the wider internet, is actively exploring ways to address these issues and contribute to a solution. Lastly, while acknowledging the potential of AI, he expressed a degree of skepticism about the current investment climate, suggesting that a large portion of funding might not yield valuable outcomes.