Cloudflare posted a 2025 founder's letter and I haven't seen much discussion of it. But, when you read through it, what they discuss and propose is deeply troubling for the web as have and currently know it.
It's already clear that the Internet's discovery system for the next 15 years will be something different: Answer Engines
They proclaim that "answer engines" will replace search. What are "answer engines"? Well, they're what we're now having foisted up on us: chat interfaces that conveniently fail to direct traffic to the sites and platforms they've scraped for citations and data while keeping users on their own platform.
"Search is dead because we killed it. Talk to our chatbot."
Search worked (and works) quite well. You hit a revenue ceiling with it, so you're trying to kill it and force users to "the future". You're pivoting to the next thing you can strip mine for value.
Whether you like it or not, the future will increasingly be answers not searches.
It's inevitable, so deal with it.
In the short term, this is going to be extremely painful for some industries that are built based on monetizing traffic.
We might kill your business, but that's fine because we don't care for it.
We can often look to sci-fi movies to have a glimpse into our most likely future.
Sci-fi is quite often a warning, not an instruction manual. Onward to the torment nexus.
So what, dear leader(s), does this bright, shimmering future hold for us? Well, it's a bit like the Spotify model or the gig work model.
As a rough and simplistic sketch, think of it as some number of dollars per AI company’s monthly active users going into a collective pool to be distributed out to content creators based on what most fills in the holes in the cheese.
We'll pool some revenue and dole it out to you based on how valuable we decide it is. How do we decide how valuable it is? Shut up and trust us. It's the Spotify model for the entirety of the internet. Or the gig model or any other platform where tech companies have sold something as innovation when, in fact, they were positioning themselves as middlemen to extract value for themselves.1
You could imagine an AI company suggesting back to creators that they need more created about topics they may not have enough content about. Say, for example, the carrying capacity of unladened swallows because they know their subscribers of a certain age and proclivity are always looking for answers about that topic. The very pruning algorithms the AI companies use today form a roadmap for what content is worth enough to not be pruned but paid for.
AI company suggestions to creators to create what the engines need. It's "pivot to video" all over again.
Oh and, yes, pruning algorithms. I'm sure they'll make those readily available and transparent.2
Ideally there should be lots of AI companies, large and small, and lots of content creators, large and small.
Because that's happened so often in the past.3
As we think about our role at Cloudflare in this developing market, it's not about protecting the status quo but instead helping catalyze a better business model for the future of Internet content creation.
One in which it's governed by vast platform gatekeepers. Someone has to facilitate revenue pooling, right? For a nominal fee. Here's an SDK or something. We're opening a gateway to the future and we'll hold on to the keys for you.