{"id":332398,"date":"2025-12-07T08:36:19","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T08:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/332398\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T08:36:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T08:36:19","slug":"cloudflare-says-it-has-fended-off-416-billion-ai-bot-scrape-requests-in-five-months-ceo-warns-of-dramatic-shift-for-internet-business-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/332398\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloudflare says it has fended off 416 billion AI bot scrape requests in five months \u2014 CEO warns of dramatic shift for internet business model"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said that his company has blocked over 416 billion AI bot requests since making it the default option in July of this year after it announced the Content Independence Day initiative. Prince said in an interview with Wired<\/a> that this feature allows website owners to block AI crawlers by default, unless the AI company pays them to gain access to their content.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe business model of the internet has always been to generate content that drive traffic and then sell either things, subscriptions, or ads, Prince told Wired. \u201cWhat I think people don\u2019t realize, though, is that AI is a platform shift. The business model of the internet is about to change dramatically. I don\u2019t know what it\u2019s going to change to, but it\u2019s what I\u2019m spending almost every waking hour thinking about.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

While Cloudflare blocks almost all AI crawlers, there\u2019s one particular bot it cannot block without affecting its customers\u2019 online presence \u2014 Google<\/a>. The search giant combined its search and AI crawler into one, meaning users who opt out of Google\u2019s AI crawler won’t be indexed in Google search results. \u201cYou can\u2019t opt out of one without opting out of both, which is a real challenge \u2014 it\u2019s crazy,\u201d Prince continued. \u201cIt shouldn\u2019t be that you can use your monopoly position of yesterday in order to leverage and have a monopoly position in the market of tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

You may like<\/p>\n

Human-generated content is crucial for AI companies to train their models on, as research has proven that AI models turn to slop when trained on AI-generated data<\/a>. AI summaries have been proven to reduce traffic on websites \u2014 especially impacting those that heavily rely on visibility and views for ad revenue \u2014 but licensing deals can help offset this, helping online publications remain a viable source of income for creators and publishers.<\/p>\n

Cloudflare will also benefit from a varied internet that hosts content from real humans. Its CEO told Wired that the company is aiming for a future where creators and businesses grow on a level playing field, as there would be more websites that need protection, resulting in more potential clients for Cloudflare. This makes it one of the biggest content delivery networks in the world, owning 79.9% of the market as of 2022. However, this also makes the internet vulnerable, like when a single misconfigured file knocked out a huge chunk of the web<\/a> in November.<\/p>\n

This highlights the current problem we have with the global web infrastructure<\/a>, which relies on just a few big companies \u2014 AWS, Azure, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, and Google, to name a few \u2014 to serve the entire planet. While these institutions have made things easier and more streamlined for corporations that rely on the internet, it also means that just one of these services going down will cost billions in losses and severe disruption across the globe.<\/p>\n

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\"Google\n<\/p>\n

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