AI Is Wrecking the Web — And No One’s Ready

Cloudflare’s CEO had something to say about AI and its effect on the business model of the web. He believes that AI is turning the economic engine of the web upside down, and Google is at the very center of it.

Cloudflare CEO believes that AI is wrecking the web’s business model

Matthew Prince is the person in question, and he laid out his remarks in a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations. “AI is going to fundamentally change the business model of the web. The business model of the web for the last 15 years has been search… search drives everything that happens online,” he said.

He believes that Google’s value exchange with content creators has collapsed. This is the exact quote: “Ten years ago… for every two pages of a website that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. … That was the trade. … Now, it takes six pages scraped to get one visitor.”

That did cause the rise of zero-click searches. In case you’re wondering what that is, a zero-click search basically happens when searchers get answers directly on Google’s search page. Thus the website owners don’t get the traffic from users. Prince believes that 75% of the queries get answered without you actually leaving Google.

AI is making the whole issue Google created worse

AI makes the whole situation worse, Prince believes. AI companies essentially scrape far more content per user interaction than Google ever has, and return less to creators in the process. He said: “What do you think it is for OpenAI? 250 to one. What do you think it is for Anthropic? Six thousand to one.”

All this combined threatens the sustainability of the web as we know it. Prince said that “if content creators can’t derive value, then they’re not going to create original content.”

He also added that AI companies are very much aware of this problem. The business model of the web can’t survive unless some major changes are issued. Prince said: “Sam Altman at OpenAI and others get that. But… he can’t be the only one paying for content when everyone else gets it for free.”

There has to be some sort of guideline, law even, for scraping content

So, essentially, there has to be some model (dare I say law) in use that would guide all AI companies. Scraping content from creators just like that, without providing any value in return, doesn’t make sense. It is definitely not the way to go.

Cloudfare’s CEO did say that Cloudfare itself is right in the middle of this problem. He said that Cloudflare powers 80% of AI companies, and 20-30% of the web. He also added that Cloudflare is now trying to figure out how to help with the whole situation, to be a part of the solution.

In conclusion, he was also kind of skeptical when it comes to AI. He noted that he’s not against it, but the investment frenzy is out of hand. “I would guess that 99% of the money that people are spending on these projects today is just getting lit on fire. But 1% is going to be incredibly valuable”, he said.

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