Publishers are on the brink of collapse as artificial intelligence tools and search platforms strip away traffic, revenue, and visibility, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said. Speaking at an Axios event on June 19, Prince warned that original content is being used without compensation while the core business models that support publishing are disappearing.
“All three of those things are going away, and they’re going away fast,” Prince said at the event, referring to ad revenue, subscriptions, and the reputational value that content creators rely on. “If people don’t have incentive to create content, they’re not going to create content… and the internet dies.”
Prince said that a decade ago, for every two pages Google scraped, it sent one visitor back to publishers. That dropped to one in six six months ago. Today, it is one in 18. “What changed? The answer is AI Overview,” he said, referring to Google’s new search feature that displays answers without users clicking through to original sources. “I bet that the answer today is that 90% of queries to Google get answered without people clicking on a single link.”
He said the problem is even more severe with generative AI platforms. “What’s the ratio for OpenAI six months ago? 250, to one. What is it today? 1500 to one… What’s AnthropIC? 6000 to one, six months ago. What is it today? 60,000 to one.”
Prince warned that unless publishers act, licensing deals with AI companies will only worsen. “Until you restrict content… the renewal of the deal that you signed today will be worse tomorrow.”
Cloudflare plans to help publishers block AI crawlers. “We’re going to make sure that if you want to stop content from being scraped off your site, we’re going to protect you,” he said. “Every publisher you have ever heard of is on board.”
A coordinated shutdown is planned for the end of June. “There’s going to be a big red button, and we’re going to have a whole bunch of publishers and content creators push the button… and shut down AI crawlers across the entire Internet,” Prince said.
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