Cloudflare CEO: We're Ready To Block Millions of Websites From AI — With Matthew Prince

Matthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Prince joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss Cloudflare’s plan to block Google from millions of ad and subscription-supported websites unless publishers choose to opt out. Tune in to hear why he believes Google must pay for access to online content, how AI is destroying the web’s traditional traffic model, and why the era of SEO is coming to an end. We also cover micropayments for publishers, the risks AI agents pose to small businesses, and how commerce could consolidate around a handful of giant companies. Hit play for an urgent look at the fight over who controls the future of the internet. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  In an internet where AI bots now outnumber humans, what happens to the web? And can news, information publishers and small businesses survive? That's coming up with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis Chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience? And what companies need to get right in the AI era? Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, Head of Enterprise Business Solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs and lessons along the way.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razor were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Well, on the web, AI bots now outnumber humans. So we have more AI traffic than human traffic and that's obviously changing the dynamics and the incentives for news publishers, information publishers, and of course, small businesses. So what is going to happen to the web? Well, today we are lucky to be joined by Matthew Prince. He is the CEO of Cloudflare. He was with us almost exactly a year ago, talking about Cloudflare's efforts to prevent the web from disappearing. The web is still here, but maybe not as healthy as it was a year ago. And obviously not due to the failure of those efforts, but the force of AI marches on.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  And so we will talk about what that battle is going to look like moving forward. Matthew, it's great to see you again. Welcome back to the show.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me on.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  All right, let's go with the headline here, which is that recently Cloudflare has found that AI bots outnumber humans browsing the web. I can't tell whether that's surprising or not. I think part of me would say, hey, you know, of course that's happened and it's surprising that it just happened. The sort of conventional wisdom is there's always been a lot of bot traffic on the web. But just talk a little bit about the escalation in AI traffic that you're seeing, whether that's, you know, crawling for new information or agents taking action and what it says about the rise in in these type of AI applications recently.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I'm, I'm certainly surprised. You know, I was asked at Web Summit in November of 2025, when, when we thought that automated traffic would pass human traffic online. And we pulled all the data and looked at it and we, and our best estimate, based on trends, was that it was going to be in the second half of 2027. At South by Southwest in March of 2026, was asked the same question again. We pulled the same data again and we're like, huh, that's interesting. It's moved up. Is now we think going to be in the first half of 2027? And so I was, I was floored when our team came to us and said, when my team came to me and said,

• 3:26Speaker 01

  in May of, of, of 2026, you won't believe it, but we now see that automated traffic has passed human traffic for the first time in the history of the internet. And, and I think that that, that really does just show how fast this is progressing and how fast the actually the derivative is, is changing. Where the, the slope of the line is getting, is getting steeper. And if we, if we just assume the current trends, what's, what's blows my mind is that if you just fast forward five years from now, we estimate now that automated traffic online will be a thousand times what human traffic is. And that's because human traffic is going to drop. It's going to be because automated traffic is just going to continue to rise like crazy over, over that period of time.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  And that's going to put, you know, enormous strain on the resources of the internet. It's going to put enormous strain on the infrastructure. And, and it's a lot of what, you know, the team at Cloudflare is thinking about is how do we make sure that the internet is ready for what is going to be, you know, just a, a complete and total onslaught of, of automated traffic.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Right, and I'm sure you've heard of dead internet theory, but for those who haven't, it's this theory that one day the web is basically going to consist of, of bots and automated content. And there are, the bots will be manipulating that content for algorithmic curation. So what you see in your social feed is effectively a dead internet that looks like it's real. Yeah. This is obviously a little different than that.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think, actually the trends we're seeing are kind of the opposite of that. It's actually interesting for, you know, Cloudflare started and launched in 2010. And, and around 2015, the web stopped growing. In fact, it plateaued and then it was even declining slightly over, over the last, you know, 10, 10 years. And then right around kind of October of 2025, the, the web started growing again and it started growing at a rate which, which most closely resembled kind of the mid 2000s. And the content that's being created is not, like, I would not describe it as, as automated sort of slop.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  There's some of that, but there's always been, you know, there's always been some of that. What I think has happened instead is that, you know, people who were not particularly technical, people who didn't have a lot of resources, but they had an interesting idea, they had a story to tell, they had something to share. All of a sudden were able to use, you know, incredible tools like, you know, lovable or a Replit or, you know, what the team over at at Base44, you know, Wix is doing, like, and then have those tools be able to build, you know, pretty sophisticated applications. And, and that's like, for the, for the first time, almost in Cloudflare's history, we're seeing an explosive growth in things which are getting created.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And instead of it making the internet worse, I actually think the internet's getting better right now. It's just the interface that we're all going to consume it through is going to be very different. It's, it's going to be much more mediated through some sort of an AI interface. But I, I think it's incredible that, you know, you can, even if you don't have technical skills now, put together an application, put together a website and bring that online. And, and again, I think that that's, that, that's remarkable. And I, and I think is actually making, the, the web is getting healthier, not less healthy right now.

• 6:53Speaker 00

  Okay, I actually want to press you on this one because one of the studies that was done about this showed that like, for instance, while there are many more apps on the Apple App Store, for instance, their reviews are going down, right? The, it seems like the weekly active users hasn't really increased. So yes, there's been this ability to create a lot of new stuff, but it also seems like a lot of that, I mean, I know you said it's not slop, but what, something close to it. There's, what do you think?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Again, I, what I see every day is just people who didn't have the resources, the ability, able to create things which are valuable. And so, yeah, there's going to be stuff that's not available, of course. But, but I think that the net has been that we're getting more things out there. I do think that we're going to move more and more away from kind of an app store model. Because that's not going to be the interface where we, where we, where we reconnect with it. And, and the app store in some ways was an enormous threat to the web. Like it, it took people away from the web. It was probably one of the biggest, between it and Facebook were like the two biggest forces that really made the web less interesting. I think now putting things on, back on the web and then making sure that they're accessible

• 8:07Speaker 01

  across the different AI systems in a way that makes sense for creators and, and, and make sure that creators get compensated, is going to be something which actually I think will, will, will reinvigilize the web. And it's, and it's exactly what we have, you know, been, been seeing. And, and again, I have both just personal examples from, you know, colleagues, family who have been able to get online and, and tell things. But then also professional examples where every day I'm getting letters from people who are like, we're, I'm able to do something that I was just never thought I would be capable of doing before. And using some of these, again, incredible tools that are out there, combined with the infrastructure that someone like Cloudflare provides, you know, very cost effectively.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  I think it's actually making it so that humans assisted with AI are, are more creative than they've, than they've ever been.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm just going to pause to say, when I built the website for our summit, which happened in June, and when I'm saying I, I should really put quotes around it. It was mostly the Claude code harness hooking into the Cloudflare agent that went out and set up all these accounts for me and then, and then built the site, so.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, but it's extraordinary. Like, but what, like, compare that with what you would have had to do in the past, which is, you know, hire a whole.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  I wouldn't be able to. There's no way I couldn't even start.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  The resources would, like, you alone wouldn't be able to start, so you'd hire someone to do it. And, and yeah, so that, that, that has enabled you to do more interesting things. And I think that that's, that's, that's what technology at its best does. Is it, it empowers more people to have access to something than they had, they had before. We're doing this, you know, remote, even just 10 years ago. Like, what would it have cost to do like a live video setup with, you know, 4K video, you know, in two different places? I mean, it would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars just to have the studio time or, or, you know, set up cameras in order to do this. And yet we've been able to, to do this. I think AI is no different. It's going to enable more people to be able to be creative and do interesting things.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  And, and, and if we get the incentives right, then hopefully it also makes it so that we can have more, more entrance into, into the marketplace. I think there's like figuring out what's the business model of the next five years of the internet? I mean, the next, over the next five years, figuring out what the business model of the next 30 years of the internet? Like, that's the most interesting and important question in technology today, by far.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  If we get that right, I think it's, it's, we're about to be on a golden age of content creation and, and, and it could be incredible. If we get it wrong, you know, there's, there's a, we can, we can, it's easy to list what the parade of horribles could be.

• 10:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so let's, let's dig into this, right? Because on, there's two sides of it. There's the content creation side, and then there is the browsing of that content. And this is sort of picking up a little bit about what we spoke about last year is

• 11:07Speaker 00

  more and more that content is being crawled or accessed by AI. Right? So you've seen this, this massive increase in AI traffic to websites in the past year to the point where it's now overtaken humans. So do you have any visibility into whether that is AI bots accessing it to train new models primarily? Agents using those websites as a human would? Or, you know, maybe a query that at test time. So as the bot is trying to find an answer, it goes to a site and it, and it ends up, you know, bringing that back into the chatbot interface without a person actually going to the website itself.

• 11:51Speaker 00

  So what are the proportions? If you have any sense of that?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it's all of the above. And so I think all of those will drive, drive things. There's, there's, there's definitely an uptick in training as more model providers are coming online. I mean, I don't think that, you know, like OpenAI is, you know, crawling a little bit more than they did, you know, a year ago. Anthropic's crawling a little bit more than they did a year ago, but, but it's more that we've just got more people building models. And I think that's great. Like we should have, like the world shouldn't be five, you know, frontier model providers. It should be 500,000. And how do we make it so that that's, that's, that's available? I think at the same time, you've got sort of agents that are operating on their own. That's probably the smallest of the categories right now. I think that that will grow and become a pretty large category, but right now that sort of agent to agent kind of commerce and things is, is, is, is less like that.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  That's, that's more of a future thing than a present thing. And then I think you are getting more of the, you know, AI acting almost as on behalf of humans going out and accessing things. But I think it's, it's almost, you know, it's wrong to say that they're acting exactly like humans do. I mean, the scale is just dramatically different. If I'm shopping for a digital camera unassisted by an agent, I might visit, I mean, if I'm really interested, I might visit five websites, you know, and on every website, maybe there's 10 pages or something like that. My agent is going to visit a thousand websites and visit every page on all of them. And so like the load that that then puts on this, especially if there's no, there's no financial disincentive to just

• 13:21Speaker 01

  crawl everything, right? Is, is pretty substantial. Now, I think you have got to balance that against, you know, what's, what's the benefit to the user and the fact that agents are infinitely patient that they, you know, that they, that they will look through everything. I think that's, that's, that's really good for end users. But there's servers behind, you know, every one of those requests. There's bandwidth that has to, you know, get paid for. There's content had to get created. And so there's got to be some exchange of value. And if the AI companies are just taking without, without returning some sort of value, then that, then that, then that just doesn't make sense. And so that's, that's again, what I think we've got, we've got to figure out.

• 13:58Speaker 00

  Right. So I think that, you know, when you talk about this and your view is that we're eventually going to go to, I think you said a thousand times more bot traffic than human traffic, right? In five years, which is crazy. Okay. First of all, just

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Can you give some sense of how, like, how intense this is? The internet, European internet came this close to completely collapsing in COVID, because in COVID, over a period of two weeks, internet traffic doubled and especially doubled for, for video streaming, which was a, which was a very high bandwidth. It does, I think, but I remember being on a phone call with senior leaders at Netflix, Disney, Akamai, YouTube, you know, all the major streaming platforms. And it was basically like this Mexican standoff where, where, where, where nobody wanted to reduce their, the quality of their video stream.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Because, you know, they're like, people pay for us because we have, you know, 4K video and we're not going to reduce it. But what was happening was everyone was their kid, like in Europe, everyone was putting their kids in front of the TV, you know, streaming first thing in the morning. And that was unfortunately lining up with Asia where everyone was getting, you know, was, was after dinner was turning on, you know, something to watch. And it was just causing so much traffic that we were, we were running out of capacity online. And eventually people had to, we had to cut their video streaming

• 15:29Speaker 01

  resolution down in order to make sure the European internet stayed online. And by the way, if the European had fallen over, then Asia would have been next. The US would have been okay for a little bit longer, but at some level, like there's a finite capacity to all this stuff. So you've got to be able to support it. And that was at 2X. At a thousand X, it's going to be completely different. And so again, we're spending a bunch of time trying to figure out, how do we make sure that the technologies are ready? So like WordPress, most popular platform for hosting content. It's out there, it's run a programming language called PHP, not the most efficient programming language. And so we're like, listen, we want to support the WordPress community. We want to make sure WordPress is successful. But if it costs, I was meeting with one of the largest WordPress hosts

• 16:11Speaker 01

  a little bit ago, and they said, you know, it is, it costs us about $3.17 to host a website on WordPress. And then we charge like $1,299 to it. And that's, that's sort of what their business is. I was like, if traffic went up a thousand X, what would happen? And they're like, well, then it would cost us over $3,000 to host that website. And again, the average WordPress user isn't going to be willing to spend over $3,000 to host their WordPress website. So we've got to change some of these fundamental technologies. And again, I think in the best case, it's still the user interface and the ecosystem, everything that people have come to love about WordPress. But what the underlying technologies made much, much, much more efficient so that you could actually, you know, scale to what's coming.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  And that's, that, that, that volume of what's coming is just, is just, again, it's, it's almost inconceivable to, to, to think about.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  All right. We have to spend some time talking about this because this is very interesting. So first of all, to anticipate a 1,000X increase in web traffic coming from bots in five years. I mean, yes, like, you know, we, we've seen, or you've seen quite an increase recently. But in a thousand X is, is a crazy number. So what is going to make up that thousand X? Like what makes you believe that that's going to be the case?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  I mean, we just look at the trends right now. I mean, in, in May, we saw that, that, you know, the automated traffic crossed. And we kind of extrapolate out what that rate of change is. And then we assume that, again, the, the exponent is going to, is going to increase on, on, on that. Cause, cause it's, you know, AI is still way underpenetrated with what's there. But we've got to invent new technologies in order to support it. So just to give you some, some sense. Let's imagine that just every knowledge worker on earth had an agent that was working for them 24/7, right? Helping them do their job. And I, and again, that's, that seems reasonable. Like every knowledge worker is going to have some agent that's, that's working for them.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Very few do today, really, but, but over time, like that, that becomes, becomes reasonable. Just with that, and putting GPUs aside, just looking at CPUs. If every one of those agents ran in a traditional container, like, you know, which is, which is not even a VM, not even its own server, but just a container, right? You would need more than 40 times the current CPU production in a, in a calendar year in order to support that level. And that's with one agent. I would guess that most knowledge workers are going to have many agents that are going to be working on their behalf. So we just don't, using the current technology, we don't have the ability to support what's coming.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  And so again, what we're spending a lot of time at Cloudflare is thinking about like, okay, like we went from servers to VMs to containers in order to get more efficient, but even containers, you've got to pull in an entire operating system. You've got to build all the tool chain, all this stuff. It's pretty heavy weight. So what's even lighter weight in order to support what's, what's coming? And a lot of what we've built with our developer platform, which we call workers and, and leaning heavily on technologies like isolates that allow you to, you know, have much, much, much lighter weight services. We think that those are the sorts of things that the internet's going to have to have if it's going to be able to continue to scale, to support the, the, the level of agent traffic that

• 19:41Speaker 01

  just is inherent to, to, to what, what I think the future holds.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  So just to put a fine point on it, the increase is going to be agent driven, right? That one thousand increase.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Or hu- humans interacting with their agents, right? So but just gonna be automated. And again, the way to just think about it is, again, we've, if you've used ChatGPT, if you've used Claude, if you've used Grok, like, and you play with them and you just ask them a question, just count how many websites, like you ask a

• 20:09Speaker 00

  A lot of sites.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Question and it's just going to brrrr across everything. Like now imagine that not in the hands of, you know, probably about one percent of global knowledge workers, like in terms of using it on a regular basis. Just, just scale that up to a hundred percent of knowledge workers. And instead of it being something that you use maybe once or twice a day, it's something you're using for every task. And it's really easy to just see how a thousand X is not, in five years, is not only inconceivable, but it might actually be a low estimate.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is crazy. So basically, last year, we talked about the economics for publishers might not make sense because if you're paying somebody to write, you know, an article and Anthropic crawls it and drops it into Claude, then they sort of get cut out of the value proposition.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  But now, a year later, you know, as we've seen this rise in agentic traffic, the problem actually is much, uh, much broader because now a website that you might not have even needed to invest a lot into making the content for, uh, if they get faced with this increase of traffic could cost much, much more to upkeep. And then the economics of, you know, even sustaining them become questionable if you can't find a way to do it more efficiently.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  So I think the thing that's, that's really important is that different content creators, different publishers, different app developers are going to have different preferences that are there. And at CloudFlare, what we believe is we want to make it as efficient as possible for the companies that want their content in AI. And we want to create the systems and incentives for those companies that don't want their content in AI, and especially if they're not compensated for it, to be able to control that. But let's talk about the majority. The majority of companies that are out there, the majority of content that's created, they actually want that content in AI, like CloudFlare. Like our knowledge base is a way of us sharing how to use CloudFlare really well. And we want to make sure that every AI system has it and has access to it.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  And so like for that, what we have to do is figure out how to make it as efficient as possible. How do we make sure that we're not delivering a big, heavy HTML page, but just a markdown that is, is actually required? How do we make sure that we can actually get systems into AI as efficiently as possible with caching and other things that are out there? And our goal has to be, how do we make every time we serve a page, one one thousandth of the cost of what it used to be? Because that's the only way that we're going to stay ahead of the demand, which is coming down for those companies that want to have their content in AI. There's a different class of companies and they tend to be companies that are, you know, either ad-supported or subscription-supported. And in those cases, AI, that's where the people are feeling like their, their content is being stolen from them.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  And in those cases, again, different from the majority of companies, but in those cases, those publishers want to have the controls to say, you can only get my content if you compensate me for it because you're going to hurt me in terms of advertising revenue to everything else. The efficiency still matters. We still want them to be much more efficient. But then we also want to give them the tools to be able to say, you know, I want to enforce what the rules are, where you can't have my content unless you pay for it. And then we want to make it as easy as possible for agents to actually pay for that content and be able to have a real exchange of value.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Okay, so, uh, there's these two buckets. One is the bucket of companies that want their stuff crawled, which is most of them. But then we do get to the news publisher side. And, um, you know, there is a risk here, and we've talked about this show a lot, that the incentives for news publishers and information publishers will go to zero if the bots just crawl the information they put on their websites and then present it to them in the chatbot format. I think you've mentioned that people don't really click the footnotes anymore. They just trust what the bot says. And so let me share again the stats, um, about where things looked last year. So last year, you told us, um, that 10 years ago on Google, if you were, uh, Google would crawl your page twice and send one click for those two crawls.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Six months ago, it was six crawls, uh, for one click. With once Google released AI overviews, uh, mid last year, it was, became 18 crawls for one click. OpenAI, uh, had 1,500 calls, crawls for every click that it sent. And Anthropic and Claude, uh, were about 60,000 crawls for every click that it sent to publishers. Um, where do those numbers stand today?

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, everything has gotten basically, uh, assuming you're a publisher, from the publisher's perspective, uh, it's gotten twice as bad. They just double every one of those, those numbers over the last year. Um, now, from the end user's perspective, I think what you see is actually something quite different, which is, it seems like the world has gotten better, like the AI systems are smarter. They seem like they're responding better. They're giving you the answers that you need with you out, you having to double check them. And those two things are actually completely consistent. Because it's not like the, the UI changed. It's not like the behaviors of the, of the AI companies, uh, changed. What changed is the results got better. And as the results got better, people click through to the sort of original sources much less. And that, I think, is in- indicated by the fact that you've had, you know, again, a, a very substantial drop

• 25:07Speaker 01

  in, in, further drop in that. And that's, that's the trend. Like over time, even Google has announced that the sort of the era of ten blue links is going away and that everything is going to look much more like an AI interface. And, and I think that that's the change. And if that's the case, then the business model, which has supported the web for the last 30 years, which has been advertising and subscription-based, isn't going to be the business model that supports it for the next 30 years. And we've got to figure out what that is. And for sure, some of that is going to be deals between the big publishers and the AI companies. We're seeing those increase substantially. But we've got to have something that actually works for everyone. And so, you know, one of the things that we're thinking about is how do you have actually micropayments? Where if you're accessing a piece of information that a site can say, listen, you can have this,

• 25:52Speaker 01

  but it's going to cost you a fraction of a penny. And at the minimum, that's going to cover the, the infrastructure costs of serving it. But in the case of, you know, people who are doing real journalism or academic work or other things, maybe it helps cover the cost of actually supporting the creator that's behind it as well. But it's, it's crazy, like the volume. Like here, here's the interesting technical problem. So Visa, largest payments network in the world, handles at peak during the holidays somewhere around 20,000 financial transactions per second. CloudFlare, uh, handles about half a billion, um, internet transactions per second. Those are not financial transactions, so it's different stakes. But we think that somewhere between one and 10% of those will, day one,

• 26:33Speaker 01

  be monetizable through agents with, with a, um, with a micropayments transaction, which means that if you're going to build something like this, you've got to build a payments infrastructure that can day one support somewhere around 10 and then be able to scale to over a hundred million financial transactions per second in order to be able to support what's there. Now, these are going to be really, really, really small transactions, but they're still financial transactions. You've still got to account for them and, and do that. That's an incredibly interesting and hard technical problem. And, and we're looking for both, you know, external partners that can solve that, but we're also working on how internally we can build that. And those are the sorts of things that you have to have in place in order to then support what is a new business model for the internet. And that's, um, and again, I, I can't imagine any problem that's more exciting to be working on right now.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a year ago, basically, the solution that you proposed was, um, or sort of implemented was, um, a system where if you want to crawl a publisher page, you would have to pay that micropayment. And if you didn't, uh, pay it, then you'd be blocked.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Well, I think, that's not exactly, I don't think we had the infrastructure to do, and we still don't have the infrastructure to do the micropayments. I think what we, and what we put in place was a set of tools that allowed those content creators that were typically ad-supported or subscription-supported to be able to control who had access to their site. And what we saw from the largest publishers that are out there, you know, the, the, um, uh, People Inc., uh, you know, the, the, um, Conde Nast, uh, New York Times, um, you know, Financial Times, um, The Atlantic, like those publishers actually went out, used those tools in order to then control the AI companies and then strike deals with them. I think the next step now is both, how do we make sure that all of the AI companies have to play by the same rules?

• 28:18Speaker 01

  And the, the big boogeyman out there is, is Google. Um, because Google is basically saying, you know, if you want to be in search, you also have to let us use our AI thing. They're using one crawler to do two things. And they're trying to leverage their sort of monopoly that they had yesterday into the monopoly tomorrow. That gives them a huge advantage. Um, Google, to give you some sense, these are more than two times as much of the web as OpenAI, more than four times as much as Anthropic, more than five times as much as Microsoft. Like they just have this enormous crawling advantage, which is going to give them an advantage in AI over time. We've got to figure out how to either bring everybody else up or get Google to play by the same rules. And I think we've made some real progress on that over the, over the, over the last year. And, and we're headed towards a place where we're going to treat Google the same as everyone else.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  And then, and then I think the second thing, uh, that, that we have to do is we actually have to have the infrastructure in place to support the folks who aren't going to be able to go out and negotiate deals on their own. They're not Conde Nast, they're not People Inc. They're, they're, you know, small blogs, they're, they're, you know, mom and pop shops. And, and we've got to be able to make it so that even they can essentially have a rate card where they said, listen, you want my content? Here's the, here's the way that you pay, and we can make it easy for those transactions to take place. But it's important to remember, that's just for the ad-supported and subscription sites that are out there. The vast majority of the web, people want their content to be in AI, and we've got to make that easy for them as well.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  Right. So then how do you read this Wall Street Journal article that came out recently? It said, "Google was a lifeline for publishers. Now some are thinking of cutting it off." The article talks about how Reddit has discussed shutting off the technology like Google's technologies, access to its content for AI use. It's also got some quotes from people who you've mentioned, I mean, come from companies that you've mentioned, right? Neil Vogel from People says, "Turning them off and blocking them entirely is 100% on the table." USA Today's co-chief executive Mike Reed, "It's time to take a stand and say enough as is enough." Is this, is the right way to read this article? That like, now that these publishers have put into place your technology that might allow them

• 30:21Speaker 00

  to block the AI crawling, they're now doing the, this sort of negotiating in public where they're telling Google, "Hey, listen, if you don't give us the terms that we want, we are just going to use CloudFlare's tech and block you."

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Well, if Google is just another AI company, then they should be treated like any other AI company. And if every other AI company has to pay for content, so should Google. Like, Google is not special, just because they were, again, the business model of the last 30 years of the internet. They're not going to be the business model, at least not that way. It's not going to be ads, it's not going to be subscriptions for the next 30 years. And so as that changes, Google should have to change with it. And I'm encouraged that, again, all of the publishers are, are coming to that conclusion independently. I'm encouraged that they can then use our technology to do that. And what we have said at CloudFlare is that by mid-September, we're going to treat Google the same way

• 31:14Speaker 01

  on, if you have an, you know, ads, if you're a business, it's ad-supported or subscription-supported, that we're going to restrict Google from being able to access your content. You can always opt out, like, you don't have to, like, you, if you, if you're like, "No, I love Google, they've always been good to me, they can have access to my content for free," go ahead, that's, that's fine. But the defaults for us, starting in mid-September, are going to be that we are going to block Google by default. And I would imagine that a bunch of the largest publishers in the world are going to follow suit.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Wow. And so what does that do to, like, let's say, a publisher's, you know, ranking in the search algorithm?

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Well, again, I think, my hope is that Google is going to come around and say, "We're going to have to pay for the content." Because if they don't have the content, then, then Google's product is, is going to be, you know, significantly worse. I would say that ranking, like, thinking about SEO is, like, it's just not relevant anymore. 10 blue links are going away. Google has said that the 10 blue links are going to go away. And so if you care about being in Google, that's fine, but you should also care about being in OpenAI, and you should care about being in Claude. And again, the vast majority of content creators, that, they want that, right? And so that, that's, we're going to make that as easy as possible. But if you're ad-supported or subscription-supported, like, then, then you're, then those businesses are dying. And you've got to figure out a way to negotiate a different business.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  And it can't be that Google gets special treatment. And so, and so, again, I think that what the industry is saying is that the old world of SEO is gone, and we've got to invent a new business model for what the future looks like.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is from a New York Times article writing about some of what we're seeing with Google. It says, "Users are writing queries three times as long as the keyword-heavy questions they asked of traditional searches. People are spending one to nine more minutes in AI mode than on traditional Google searches." One October study from Growth Memo, a newsletter focused on search and marketing, found that in about 75% of sessions, users never left AI mode for the web. So basically, what I think you're saying is, we're heading towards this kind of seismic moment where publishers, you know, they've played nice with Google because they had still a lot to lose. If, you know, they sort of blocked them, that could be a big portion of their revenue. But at this point, they've basically seen like they have very little to lose left,

• 33:31Speaker 00

  and yet they're still delivering a lot of value. And we could be seeing in September, basically, this moment where this key source of information to Google goes away.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's, you know, and that's, think about what a seismic threat that is to Google in some ways. Like, the whole page rank algorithm is about building a chain that attributes information. If all of a sudden, a huge portion of that chain just drops out of their visibility, it actually breaks the fundamental way that they can do, they can do search and they can do ranking online. And so I think that that, they are finally recognizing that that is a systemic threat, that the business is, is changing. And I'm hopeful that Google, who's been, you know, this incredible patron to, to the internet, has been, you know, provided more for it for the last 30 years than anyone else, that they recognize that the internet's changing and that they should be supporting it.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  And, and again, I think actually from Google's perspective, from their business perspective, from the right thing to do as a Googler, is how do we make sure that we're the ones who are out there actually supporting content creators? And, and doing it in, in an interesting way. And I am surprised that Google has dragged their feet as much as, as they have, as opposed to leaning in and saying, "We're going to actually help build the future, invent the future, and support content creators in the future." And that's going to be, again, different than what existed before. But, again, done right, I think we could be a, a, a place where this is truly a golden age of, of content creation online.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  So, okay, so I'm getting it. So that, Wall Street Journal, I was wondering where that, what the story was with that Journal article, that all of a sudden, all these publishers were speaking up about this, but they finally have effectively the technology to do it, and now they have a deadline for Google. And if you say it in, let's say, July, you give them two months.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they've seen, and they've seen the revenue that Google is, is driving go down and down and down. Now, that, again, that doesn't mean that AI doesn't drive revenue for certain businesses. And Google keeps publishing these things, saying, you know, "Look at how great, you know, AI is for e-commerce or these other things." And that's right. The vast majority of the web wants to be in these AI systems, and we need to make it as easy as possible for them. But if you're ad-supported or subscription-supported, this is an existential threat to your business, and you've got to make sure that there's, there's something that's there. And what I think is, also is just right, is it needs to be fair. So it can't be that you charge OpenAI and Anthropic, but Google gets everything for free. Like, it's got to be that everyone plays by the same rules.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  And I think we're at that tipping point where even Google is starting to realize that the, the economics of the internet are changing, the economics of media creation are changing, and that they're going to have to get there. It's actually interesting to think about, like, the conversations with, with, like, some of the other AI labs, where they're like, "Well, none of this matters because eventually we're just going to, everyone's going to have universal basic income, and that's how people are going to get paid." And I'm like, "Okay, but that's, you're, you're living so far in the future, let's kind of work our way back. And before we get there, maybe we have some steps that we have to go through, you know, along the way." And so, again, I am optimistic, I'm way more optimistic for media companies today than I was a year ago.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  And, and I, and I really think that 2026 is going to be the year that in the media space, in the content space, that you're going to see a real shift, and, and then content creators are going to get paid. Google, by the way, is one of the best at paying content creators. You look at YouTube, why do content creators publish their content on YouTube? It's because YouTube, like, YouTube pays content creators better than anyone else. Like, they're, they're not, they're not against this across their, their entire business. They, they know how to do this in various places. I think what we've just got to do is, is help them understand that, like, the New York Times and the Atlantic and, and People and, and, you know, Vogue,

• 37:24Speaker 01

  like, they deserve, they're content creators that deserve to get paid the same way that some, you know, influencer on YouTube does.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  So you think Google's going to pay up before this deadline?

• 37:34Speaker 01

  I don't know if they'll pay up before the deadline, but I think it's inevitable that they'll pay up. Because, again, I think that they, they, they need the content, and they understand fundamentally that journalists and content creators and academics deserve to eat.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  How many of your clients, like, do you think will actually go ahead with the blocking of these AI crawlers? I'm talking about not, not your whole client base, but just the news publishers?

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Just the, just the folks who are ad-supported. So again, we've, we've done this, like, if you're, if you're not ad-supported, none of this applies to you. Like, you can, you can set, if you're ad-supported, by default, starting in mid-September, we're going to, you know, switch this over. And you can, anyone can opt out. But, but we expect that the vast, vast majority of people that have ad, ad or subscription-supported businesses will, will do this. So there will be millions of sites that will drop off of Google's radar. And, at the same time, that we will very much tighten up all of the other controls to, on, on AI crawler. So right now, it's basically put sort of a no trespassing sign in the top line, say, "Don't, don't come and get this content." And most people are actually pretty good at respecting the no trespassing sign. Starting in mid-September, we're actually going to make it not just a no trespassing sign,

• 38:44Speaker 01

  but we're actually going to have, basically put a bouncer there saying, "Unless you're compensating creators, you don't get this content."

• 38:52Speaker 00

  Millions of site could, sites could drop out of Google's ranking.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  That's a big deal.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a huge percentage of the internet uses Cloudflare. And so, again, I think we're in a position to help fix what is a fundamental market problem, where Google is leveraging their monopoly of yesterday in order to generate a monopoly tomorrow. And I think that if we don't fix that, like, who's going to? And if we don't fix that, like, as you said, the incentives for content creation just go away. And that makes everyone worse off, including Google.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Okay, so big stuff coming up ahead. I want to take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about how this might apply to, or how this new technology shift is going to reshape small businesses, which is not something that we've heard a lot about. But if we go to an agent type of web, or a super app-dominated, you know, way to browse and interact and do commerce, then potentially, small businesses are at risk. So we're going to hear Matthew's perspective on that when we come back right after this. This episode is brought to you by AppPoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about.

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  Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com/bigtech. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. That's Q U I N C E dot com slash big tech. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare. So Matthew, I've heard you speak about this a little bit, but basically, your perspective is, as we go more agentic, there are some serious risks to small businesses who might just kind of get lost in the super app shuffle. You've done it much more articulately than the way that I just described it. So can you explain sort of what the stakes are for small businesses, again, as this

• 43:26Speaker 00

  trend continues to progress, and we go to a web that's, you know, so much more bot than it is human?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, I think, first of all, like, a year ago, what we were talking about, what we were worried about was, what's going to happen to media? And I think we've actually done a ton of work and made real progress on how do we figure out a business model that's going to support media going forward? But as we've thought about that, we thought more generally about, how is this going to have other impacts across the economy? And I really do worry about small businesses. Now, that doesn't mean small businesses are doomed, but I think we have to be extremely deliberate in understanding what the risks are, and then trying to figure out, you know, what the solution is. The world that I'm trying to play for is one where there's not five AI companies, there's 500,000. There's not, you know, a tiny number of content creators, that everyone can be a content creator and put something out.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  And that, really importantly, that we don't consolidate businesses into a few big mega corporations, but it still becomes a place where, I think the internet has done historically an incredible good job, where new businesses can start up and thrive going forward. And I think that's what we have to play for, is how do we have as many small businesses as possible? So let me walk through what I think is the problem. So in order to understand, think about, you're a small business. Let's say you're starting something to be a new, you know, B to C, a DTC, a direct-to-consumer brand. I don't know, you're making, I don't know, new light bulbs, or makeup, or who knows what possibly it is. What do you do in order to reach customers?

• 44:54Speaker 01

  The answer is, you go on something like Instagram, or Facebook, or even a Google AdWords search, and you start to buy the ability to get your product in front of consumers. And consumers, you know, again, they're scrolling through their Instagram feed, and they see your, you know, slickly-produced video that, you know, maybe you raised some venture capital, or you've got, you know, a small business loan in order to put together. And if you touch kind of the emotions and speak to consumers, then the companies that do that are actually going to rise and thrive over time. And I think a lot of, if we're really honest, a lot of the small businesses that we do business with, we do business with because we have some either emotional connection to them, or because they're convenient.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Like, they save us money. Why do I shop at the local Bottega, even though I know it's more expensive? It's because it's convenient. And like, I have limited time, and so I'm not going to, you know, go find whatever the cheapest place is for eggs, I'm just going to go to wherever is most convenient. And that's what humans do. And if you think about brands, like, what a brand is, is a shortcut for humans to understand value and quality without having to do a ton of research. So I see a Marriott logo on the side of a building, I kind of know what the experience is going to be when I go in. I see a Walmart logo on the side of a building, I know what the experience is going to be when I go into that. What I think is interesting is, like, brands are going to change radically. Like, it's not going to be a couple of, like, swashes of pretty paint that agents are going to care about.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  As more and more commerce gets done through agents, what a brand means is going to be very different. Because agents have, like, they have almost infinite patience, and they don't have emotion to sort of say, oh, you know, I have this brand affiliated to Marriott Hotels, so I always stay at a Marriott Hotel. Instead, they're willing to do really in-depth research in order to figure out what's right. And at first, you might think, well, maybe that's good for the small guy. But I think it's actually going to be really hard for new entrants, because new entrants don't have very much information online. I launch a small business, trying to sell my new light bulb or makeup brand, and like, how do I get my first customer if all customers are going to be agentic in terms of that?

• 47:05Speaker 01

  I think that's a really interesting and hard problem, because the agents have infinite time to research every possible detail, and so they're going to look for where the richest sources of information that are online, which are going to be for the established, big companies that are out there. And if we can't be in a place where new entrants can easily enter the market, then what happens over time is that the big companies will acquire each other, will have massive consolidation, and it actually, for the end consumer, might seem just fine, because you can get hyper-specialized, I care, I only want brown eggs from certain hens, right? And maybe, you know, Tyson Farms can produce that for me, you know, very efficiently. But how does my local farmer find a way to actually reach this?

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Because they're just not going to have nearly the depth of information that's out there. And so what I think is the thing that we have to be continuously thinking about is, in a world where we're increasingly having commerce sort of federated by agents, and that that's the interface that people are going to do it, how do we make sure that a new brand, without any real information in the market, can actually be able to exist and thrive? Because if that doesn't happen, then agentic commerce becomes this massive tool of consolidation, and that's going to favor the big companies over the little companies. And over time, like, I was meeting with the former CEO of PayPal, who before that ran small business into it, and he said, I worry that in the future, there are only five companies. One that holds the money, one that holds the real estate, one that makes things, one

• 48:33Speaker 01

  that ships things, and an AI company. And obviously, that's not what's going to happen. But some level of consolidation is, I think, the natural trend of this. And what I've been doing to kind of, sometimes you can, you can, you can sort of see the future by watching kind of science fiction, and like, go back and watch, like, episodes of The Jetsons, the cartoon show. And it's like, you know, we, as a kid, I watched it and I thought, oh, that's kind of fun and funny. It's an incredibly nihilistic and kind of depressing world. There are only two employers in the world of the Jetsons. It's Spacely Sprockets and Cogswell's Cogs. Like George Jetson's job is to basically push the button, but the robots do everything else. And all of the commerce that George Jetson does is basically through his helpful maid robot Rosie.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  He's like, go get me eggs. And she goes off and does it and it comes back and George seems perfectly happy. But behind the scenes, like, do you think that Rosie is going to shopping at like the local bodega? Of course not. She's going to wherever she can get the most information about what the quality of eggs is. And that's going to be some mega corporation that's out there. I worry about that and I think we need to worry about that. And again, I'm not, I'm nervous about it. But I think the first way of solving it is actually articulating what the challenge is. And then thinking about how can we make sure that new entrants have a shot in a world where more and more commerce is being done by infinitely patient, you know, deeply researched, unemotional agents that are acting on our behalf.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  Can I give the counter argument? And that is that brand is actually something that favors the big companies over the small companies because they have the money to spend. And so like, you might be much more, much better suited to work with like a small business that you've never heard of. But because you, a busy person, don't have the time to research them, you just say, okay, I'm going to Target.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  No, I mean by Nike as opposed to, you know, whatever. The new, I think that might be right, if you can get that. But the question is, how do you? And that's, that's the happy story. And that's what we want to get to. But the question is, how do you boot that? How do you get the information into the system? How do you get enough customer reviews? How do you get like, and then how do you encapsulate that? So like, what is a brand in the world of agentic commerce? I don't think it's pretty swirls of paint. I think it's actually like a true attestation of quality and experience. So like, how do I take Amazon star ratings, but bundle that with what's your actual like, shipping fulfillment time? How many returns do you get? How many charge backs happen to it? How do we aggregate all that information?

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Package it up into some sort of module and then make it actually verifiable. So that when my agent comes and sees it, they go, oh, I can see that this is a quality merchant and I'm going to be able to do that. I think you have to have that, but then you also have to think, before I have any reputation, I'm just trying to prove that my product is better. How am I actually going to be able to succeed in doing that? I don't think it's impossible, but I think that left to its own devices, agentic commerce is going to be a consolidating factor. And so we have to be extremely deliberate and making sure that we're giving small businesses the tools to be able to do this. And again, I don't, I think Cloudflare can do this on our own. I would love to be part of a solution, but I'm spending a lot of time with, you know, Shopify,

• 51:48Speaker 01

  you know, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, you know, Intuit. The companies that actually deal with these small businesses and saying, how can we bring together the tools in order to make sure that they can succeed in this future? Because if they're, if they're all just sort of following what the old SEO playbook is, that's not going to work for the future. It's got to be something else. And I think it's really, one of the most important questions is, how do we make sure that these small businesses have the tools to be able to, again, live in, in what I think you described as, as the optimistic outcome? And again, I'm optimistic, but I think we should also, but in order to be optimistic, you also need to worry about what could go wrong and, and articulate it. And then figure out what are the solutions to that problem.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  Okay. So last question for you. What does that look like from a technical standpoint? Is it just like a small business has a portal in like the backend of ChatGPT and just like spends, you know, this small business owner spends their weekends like dictating all the things about their business or what could it look like? And what are the solutions we've discussed so far?

• 52:47Speaker 01

  I, like, I, like, when we talked last year, I didn't really have a sense of what like the solution for media is. And I just spent a whole bunch of time talking to media, talking to payments companies, talking to AI companies, saying, hey, this is the problem. How do we solve it? And I think we've made a lot of progress. My hope is that when we talk next year, I'll have a better answer to your question. But it's only going to be because, you know, people who hear this say, hey, I had an idea and they reach out, right? Or, or, you know, I meet with Toby from Shopify and he goes like, hey, we've, we've been working on this. Can you help distribute it for us? Or, or, you know, American Express says, hey, we've been working with all these small businesses. Here's something we found works. Like, we're trying to just gather as much information. And I don't think we're going to solve the problem, but I, I hope that we can be a part of the solution to the problem.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Because like, we could be in a place, done right, where this is actually helping more small businesses reach customers and the better product, finding the best possible consumers for that product. And done right, that, that's amazing. And then, and then by the way, we get to worry about the next problem, which is that AI is this massive divider between, you know, the rich and the poor. And, and if we're not, and if we're not in an ad-based business model anymore, which I think is likely. If you're spending thousands of dollars a year for your agent, you don't want it to be influenced by any ads at all. You want it to be completely honest. So I think the wealthy parts of the world are going to have just huge advantages over the poorer parts of the world.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  And so that's, that's, that's the next problem and that we have. And, and again, we're starting to think about it. I don't think we can solve it entirely ourselves, but I think we need to talk about these things in order to make sure that the future that we're, that we're building is one that, you know, is, is, is utopian and, and, and not dystopian as, as possible.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, we, we hope so. So Matthew, we've got a good routine going. We've done this two years in a row around this time. So we'll have to check in again next year.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  See you back there next year. And I'll tell you what the solution for small businesses is.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  Okay. It is a deal. It is a deal. All right. Thank you so much for joining Matthew. Great to have you on.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  All right. Thanks, everybody for listening and watching, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 55:10Speaker 02

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