# Cloudflare's plan to save the web from AI > Matthew Prince says bots now outnumber humans online. His company is building technology to make AI companies pay for the content they scrape. - Title: Cloudflare's plan to save the web from AI · The Verge - Summary: Matthew Prince says bots now outnumber humans online. His company is building technology to make AI companies pay for the content they scrape. Cloudflare CEO… - Keywords: cloudflare, matthew prince, artificial intelligence, bot traffic, web publishing, micropayments, google, content licensing, internet business model, ai scraping, technology, culture - Source: The Verge — https://theverge.com/podcast/1000344/cloudflare-matthew-prince-google-zero-ai-web-advertising - Author: Nilay Patel - Published: 2026-09-26T14:00:00+00:00 - Read time: 4 min - Topics: cloudflare, matthew prince, artificial intelligence, bot traffic, web publishing, micropayments, google, content licensing, internet business model, ai scraping, technology, culture ## Bots now rule the internet Cloudflare found in June that bots made up more than half of internet traffic. The company sits between websites and AI agents, giving owners control over which bots can access their content. ## Matthew Prince on Cloudflare's mission Prince is cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare. He says the company is trying to rebuild the internet the way it should have been built from the beginning, with over three hundred fifty cities worldwide and thousands of data centers. ## Advertising no longer works for bots For thirty years, advertising has driven the internet's business model. But bots do not click ads or respond to branding. Cloudflare and Prince are rethinking how to pay for the infrastructure that serves them. ## Automated traffic has passed human traffic In May, Cloudflare found that automated traffic had passed human traffic online. Prince predicts that five years from now, automated traffic will be one thousand times human traffic, driven by AI companies scraping the web. ## Someone must pay for the infrastructure If automated traffic grows to one thousand times human traffic, someone must pay for the bandwidth and servers. Prince says the traditional advertising model does not work for bots, so a new payment system is needed. ## AI companies have enormous demand Anthropic added ten billion dollars of revenue in a single month. AI companies need talent, chips, and data. Prince says data is the constraint that will change as content creators demand payment from bots. ## The four zero two protocol returns Prince says the four zero two protocol, written in the first version of Netscape, was payment required. Cloudflare is working with Coinbase and Stripe to let content creators charge bots a fraction of a penny per access. ## The tragedy of the commons problem Without payment, an AI agent will scan every menu in a city to answer where you should eat lunch, wasting resources. Prince says there must be a cost to loading webpages, even a thousandth of a penny, to constrain demand. ## Spotify shows the path forward Prince flew to Stockholm to meet Daniel Ek, who started Spotify. The music industry was valued at eight billion dollars twenty three years ago. Spotify now sends twelve billion dollars back into the music creator ecosystem annually. ## Spotify publishes unfulfilled demand Spotify tells music creators what songs people search for but cannot find. A man in Denmark makes forty million euros a year writing songs for unfulfilled Spotify queries. Others make millions doing the same. ## AI reveals holes in human knowledge Large language models are a mathematical model of human knowledge. Prince says they show where knowledge is missing, like a giant block of Swiss cheese. AI companies want to fill those holes with new information. ## Local news becomes valuable again Prince and his wife own the Park Record, a small local newspaper in Park City, Utah. He says they will make more money off AI licensing deals this year than off digital advertising, because AI companies need local knowledge. ## Google's crawler will be blocked by default As of September fifteenth, Cloudflare will block Google's crawler for AI training by default across all free customers. Site owners can turn it off if they choose. Prince says Google must play by the same rules as other AI companies. ## Google's search depends on the web Google's search ranking builds a tree of connections between reputable sites. If Cloudflare, which is over twenty percent of the internet, blocks Google, it creates a giant hole in the middle of that tree. ## Google signals it will change course Google has committed to more transparency on what its crawler does. It will announce when crawling for AI versus the web and give publishers the ability to say no to AI training while allowing search crawling. ## Publishers will sell more metadata Reporters write a hundred words for every word published. Magazines take fifty or sixty photos for every one printed. This metadata, traditionally constrained by physical space, becomes valuable to AI systems and can be sold separately. ## Distribution shapes what gets made Editorial choices about which image leads a story are designed to elicit reactions in humans. Publishing all photos to an AI changes the story's distribution and intended audience, fundamentally altering what the work becomes. ## Key takeaway Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince argues that as bot traffic overwhelms the web, new payment systems must replace advertising to sustain content creation and prevent a collapse of incentives to publish.