You’re Not Going to Get My Content Without Paying, Says Cloudflare CEO

Matthew Prince has numbers to back up what many content creators are beginning to feel: the economics of the internet are tilting sharply in favor of AI platforms, often at the expense of the publishers who feed them. A decade ago, Google would crawl two pages for every one visit it sent back to a content creator. That ratio has widened dramatically, Prince said in a recent CNBC interview, fifteen pages crawled for every single referral. For OpenAI, the number is far steeper: nearly 1,500 scrapes for one visit. And for some emerging players, it’s worse still. “What’s changing is not that fewer people are searching the internet,” said Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. “It’s that more and more of the answers to Google are being answered right on Google’s page.”