Cloudflare CEO Warns: AI and Zero-Click Searches Threaten Content Creators

The internet is changing fast, and many content creators are being pushed out of the picture. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is raising concerns about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the way we access and value online information. In a recent interview with CNBC, Prince said AI is accelerating the collapse of the web’s traditional business model—and he believes time is running out to fix it.

For years, search engines operated on a simple exchange. Websites allowed their pages to be indexed, and in return, search engines sent them traffic. This traffic helped publishers earn money through advertising, subscriptions, or affiliate sales. That balance is now gone.

“Ten years ago, Google would crawl two pages for every one visitor it sent,” Prince explained. “Today it is about fifteen crawls for every visitor. With OpenAI, it is closer to 1,500 scrapes per visitor.”

This marks a sharp rise in what’s now being called zero-click search—where users get answers directly from the search results page without ever visiting the original source. According to Prince, 75% of search queries on Google are now resolved without a single click. Users get what they need at the top of the page, and content creators lose the traffic that once supported them.

To illustrate this in action, I searched “tell me about zero-click search” on Google. Without needing to click any links, I was shown a direct answer compiled from multiple sources—proving how users now get information instantly, often without visiting the original websites.

AI platforms are making this problem worse. OpenAI, Anthropic, and others scrape massive amounts of content to train their models, but they send very little traffic in return. In OpenAI’s case, the scrape-to-visitor ratio has jumped from 250 to 1 just six months ago, to 1,500 to 1 today. Anthropic is estimated to be scraping as much as 6,000 pages per user interaction.

“If visitors are not seeing your ads or subscribing to your content, then it becomes much harder to be a content creator,” Prince warned. “The economics just do not work.”

Cloudflare’s Response

To address this challenge, Cloudflare has introduced several tools aimed at protecting content creators:

AI Labyrinth: Launched in March 2025, this tool detects unauthorized AI bots that ignore “no crawl” directives. Instead of simply blocking them, which might cause them to adapt, AI Labyrinth reroutes them into a maze of AI-generated decoy pages. This confuses the bots, drains their resources, and allows Cloudflare to track and identify unauthorized scraping activity.

AI Audit: This feature gives website owners clear insights into how AI models are interacting with their content. It tracks bot activity, reports on how often content is being accessed, and gives creators control over whether and how their material is used. Cloudflare is also developing a pricing system so that content creators can charge AI companies for using their work in model training.

“The fuel that runs these AI engines is original content,” Prince said. “So that content has to be created for these engines to work. And someone has to pay for it.”

A Broken Model

Prince is also critical of how the AI boom is being funded. He believes much of the current investment is based on hype, without a sustainable model to support creators. “99% of the money that people are spending on these projects is just getting lit on fire,” he said. “But 1% will be incredibly valuable.”

Still, Prince sees a path forward. He believes that while short, low-effort content may fade away, there is still strong demand for unique and valuable material. For example, detailed local weather forecasts or expert analysis on niche topics are likely to become more important. AI companies will want access to that kind of information, and some will be willing to pay for it.

“I think if content is just sort of randomly strung together, that is going away,” he told CNBC. “But original content that is actually highly valuable is going to be more valuable in this future.”

Cloudflare’s strategy is to rebuild a fair system—one that rewards content creators for their work and asks AI platforms to give back to the ecosystem they rely on. If AI is going to shape how we use the internet, it should also support the people who make it worth visiting in the first place.