On last week’s Q1 earnings call, Cloudflare — the web infrastructure and security company — talked somewhat scarily about how AI is fundamentally reshaping traffic patterns across this imperfect thing we all love (to hate), the open web.
“If you look over time,” CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince said, “the Internet itself is shifting from what has been very much a search-driven Internet to what is increasingly an AI-driven Internet.
“Ten years ago, for every two pages Google crawled, they sent you one visitor. Six months ago, that was up to six to one. The crawl rate hasn’t changed, but what’s changed is now 75% of queries to Google, Google answers on Google without sending you back to the original source.
“In the last six months, the rate has increased even further, where now it’s up to 15 to one—fifteen crawls for every one visitor. And if you look at OpenAI, which is 251 to one, Anthropic is 6,000 to one. It’s putting a lot of pressure on the media companies that are there, that are making money through either subscriptions or ads on their pages.”
Pressure, indeed.
Why This Matters:
Ultimately, this is the elephant in the room. As more users access information, not through traditional websites, but through AI chatbots and large language model-driven platforms, it raises very real existential questions, like where do the ads go? How can publishers monetize their content? And how do advertisers reach audiences?
We talk a lot about walled gardens and social media, but at least with social media, there is variety across use cases. If you want to connect with friends, there’s Facebook (the olds) or Snapchat (the youngs). For video discovery, there is TikTok and YouTube. For being angry at a brand, there is X. 🙂
But when it comes to information access, the starting point has always been search—and the offramps have been websites (mostly) where ads live. If both the starting point and the offramps get cannibalized by LLM-driven experiences like OpenAI or Perplexity, we’re not just looking at a walled garden problem, we’re looking at the potential collapse of the open web’s monetization model.
Experts React:
Michael Bishop, CTO and co-founder of OpenAds, wonders whether Cloudflare can parlay its current position into becoming an adtech company:
Our Take:
AI is both a gift and a curse for the open web. It open up and democratizes content creation in entirely new ways, while undercutting content creation/creators in the same breath. It’s a bit of a paradox. But, because all of this is happening very slowly, no one really knows what to do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
