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.”

A decade ago, Google would crawl two pages for every one user it sent to a publisher. By late 2023, that ratio had grown to 6:1. Today, according to Cloudflare’s internal data, it’s 15:1. For OpenAI, the ratio recently surged to nearly 1,500:1. And Anthropic, according to Prince, scrapes at a staggering rate of 6,000 pages per referred user. If users never leave the search engine or worse, never leave an AI chatbot, content creators lose the opportunity to monetize their work altogether.