'AI language models hitting publishers'

New Delhi: The increasing use of AI language models for information seeking and agentic commerce has put the existing internet business model under pressure, as these companies are crushing publishers, content creators, and small businesses, according to Matthew Prince, chief executive of internet infrastructure company Cloudflare.

Explaining the problem, he said that for the past decade, individuals and creators - including researchers and small businesses - have sold subscriptions or shown ads to compensate for their work. But, now AI models scrape and regurgitate information, removing direct interaction between creators and users. "Google was a great patron, but now things have changed.




"For the last 10 years, for every two pages that Google scraped on the internet, they sent back one human visitor. Today, for every 30 pages, they send just one. It has become 15 times harder to get traffic from a Google search. Microsoft performs more poorly - it sends 70 to one. If we look at the pure AI companies, OpenAI takes 37,000 pages from the internet for every one visitor it sends back. In Anthropic's case, it's half a million pages," he said.

Cloudflare handles almost 20% of internet traffic and works with all foundational model providers. "The human eyeball traffic, which is the current currency of the internet, is going away. It is never going to return in the same way. We are getting more of our answers from AI than from original sources. And so we have to figure out a new way to compensate creators," he said. Prince said the world needs to figure out a new business model for the internet and develop a new rewards system beyond traffic.
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