Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince speaks with Sara Fischer onstage at an Axios event in Cannes. Photo: Anthony Bourgeois on behalf of Axios
Publishers face an existential threat in the AI era and need to take action to make sure they are fairly compensated for their content, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Axios at an event in Cannes on Thursday.
Why it matters: Search traffic referrals have plummeted as people increasingly rely on AI summaries to answer their queries, forcing many publishers to reevaluate their business models.
Startling stat: Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent a publisher, per Prince.
- He said that six months ago:
- For Google that ratio was 6:1
- For OpenAI, it was 250:1
- For Anthropic, it was 6,000:1
- Now:
- For Google, it's 18:1
- For OpenAI, it's 1,500:1
- For Anthropic, it's 60,000:1
Between the lines: "People aren't following the footnotes," Prince said.
- While search engines and AI chatbots include links to original sources, publishers can only derive advertising revenue if readers click through.
- "People trust the AI more over the last six months, which means they're not reading original content," he said.
- "The future of the web is going to be more and more like AI, and that means that people are going to be reading the summaries of your content, not the original content."
What to watch: Prince said Cloudflare is working on a new tool that will stop content scraping.
- "That's the easy step, and that's coming very, very soon, and every publisher you have ever heard of is on board," he said.
- Cloudflare, which provides a number of tech services including cybersecurity and content delivery networks, recently launched a tool that obstructs bots that ignore "no crawl" directives.
The bottom line: Prince is optimistic Cloudflare can pull this off.
- "I go to war every single day with the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably Americans, the Israelis, all of them who are trying to hack into our customer sites. And you're telling me, I can't stop some nerd with a C-corporation in Palo Alto?"