AI threatens online publishers' survival, says Cloudflare CEO
Key topics:
AI answers reduce traffic to original content creators' websites
Publishers face steep traffic declines due to AI and search shifts
Cloudflare urges paid, exclusive deals between AI firms and media
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By Staff Writer
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned that original content creators, including top publishers like News24, IOL, TimesLive, and Daily Maverick, face an existential threat.
Prince explained that the Internet is shifting from a search-driven environment, dominated by Google, to an AI-driven space.
For the past twenty years, online publishers relied heavily on Google to generate traffic and build an audience. However, the online space is changing.
Prince said a decade ago, Google sent a visitor for every two pages it crawled. Six months ago, it was six crawls for every visit. Today, it is 15 scrapes for a visit.
The reason is that through AI advances, Google answers more questions on the page rather than sending people to a publisher through links.
“Today, 75% of all search queries get answered without you leaving Google,” the Cloudflare CEO said in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations.
The crawl-to-visitor ratio is even worse for AI platforms. OpenAI has 1,500 scrapes per visitor, and Anthropic has around 6,000 to 1.
This is bad news for online publications that rely on advertising and subscriptions for revenue, as visitors will never touch their platform.
Google’s latest AI development, AI Search, takes the on-page answer to the next level as it does not contain a list of links to publisher websites.
He said this threatens the sustainability of content creators, who will stop creating original content if there is no financial incentive.
There is an imbalance as content creators and media companies are not compensated for their resource-intensive work.
Prince highlighted that AI models are often trained on the open web without permission, attribution, or compensation.
“This model undermines the trust that powers the Internet as we know it today,” Prince said in a CNBC interview.
The data from South African publishers confirms Prince’s comments about the changing landscape for online media companies.
The IAB South Africa’s March 2025 online readership numbers showed that most large publishers’ traffic has significantly declined year-on-year.
Between March 2023 and March 2025, only five of South Africa’s top online news publications enjoyed year-on-year growth.
Twelve experienced a decline, and three of those had their traffic decline by over 50% over the last year.
The solution to the problem
Prince said regulatory or legal challenges related to how technology companies use content would be too slow to save media companies.
Instead, he suggested a model where original content creators partner with AI companies to give them exclusive access to their content.
Cloudflare is already working with online publishers and other content creators to block AI crawlers from accessing their content.
“Through Cloudflare, they tell AI crawlers that you cannot access my content unless you pay,” Prince said.
“That is what the future should be. The fuel that runs these AI engines is original content. They will not work without this content.”
He said the thoughtful AI companies, including OpenAI, realise they must pay for content. However, they cannot be the only ones doing so.
“What content creators need to do is to restrict access to their content and create scarcity of quality original content,” he said.
Price said, despite the technological advances in artificial intelligence, he remains optimistic about the future of content creation.
“If the content is just randomly strung together – quick hitting, headline first content – which has driven the web in recent years, will go away,” he said.
“Original content that is highly valuable will be even more valuable in future. AI companies will value that content.”
“AI companies will be willing to do deals for that content. However, there will have to be exclusivity where you don’t give it to everyone.”
This article was first published by My Broadband and is republished with permission