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

23:50Big Technology Podcast Host: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 about where things looked last year.

24:24Big Technology Podcast Host:So last year you told us that 10 years ago on Google, if you were to, Google would crawl your page twice and send one click for those two crawls. Six months ago, it was six crawls for one click. Once Google released AI overviews mid last year, it became 18 crawls for one click. OpenAI had 1 ,500 crawls for every click that it sent, and Anthropic and Cloud were about 60 ,000 crawls for every click that it sent to publishers. Where do those numbers stand today? Yeah, everything has gotten basically, assuming you're a publisher, from the publisher's perspective, it's gotten twice as bad. They just double every one of those numbers over the last year.

25:09Now, 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 without you having to double check them. And those two things are actually completely consistent because it's not like the UI changed. It's not like the behaviors of the of the AI companies 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.

25:37And that I think is indicated by the fact that you've had, you know, again, a very substantial drop in further drop in that. And that's that's the trend. Like over time, even Google has announced that it's sort of the era of 10 blue links is going away and that everything is going to look much more like an AI interface. 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.

26:11And 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 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, but it's going to cost you a fraction of a penny. And at the minimum, that's going to cover the infrastructure costs of serving it. But in the case of 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.

26:44But it's crazy, like the volume. 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 handles about half a billion Internet transactions per second. Those are not financial transactions, so it's different stakes. But we think that somewhere between 1 % and 10 % of those will, day one, be monetizable through agents 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 100 million financial transactions per second in order to be able to support what's there.

27:28Now, 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 do that. That's an incredibly interesting and hard technical problem. And we're looking for both 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, again, I can't imagine any problem that's more exciting to be working on right now.

27:54Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, so a year ago, basically, the solution that you proposed was, or sort of implemented, was a system where if you want to crawl a publisher page, you would have to pay that micropayment. And if you didn't pay it, then you'd be blocked. uh i think that's exactly right i don't think we had the infrastructure to do and we still don't have the infrastructure to do the micro payments i think what we impl 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 that the um uh people inc uh you know the the um condé nast New York Times, Financial Times, The Atlantic, those publishers actually went out, used those tools in order to then control the AI companies and then strike deals with them.

28:50I 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? And the big boogeyman out there is Google, because Google is basically saying, if you want to be in search, you also have to let us use our AI. I think 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. Google, to give you some sense of these, 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.

29:21Like they just have this enormous crawling advantage, which is gonna give them an advantage in AI over time. We've gotta 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 last year. And we're headed towards a place where we're going to treat Google the same as everyone else. And then I think the second thing 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.

29:49They're not People, Inc. They're small blogs. They're mom and pop shops. And we've got to be able to make it so that even they can essentially have a rate card where they say, listen, you want my content? 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 support 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. Right.

30:15Big Technology Podcast Host: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 uh access to its content for ai use uh it's also got some quotes from people who you've mentioned i mean come from companies that you've mentioned right uh neil vocal 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 to block the AI crawling.

30:59Big Technology Podcast Host:They're now doing the 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. 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.

31:30And so as that changes, Google should have to change with it. And I'm encouraged that, again, all of the publishers 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 on if you have an, you know, ads, if you're a business, it's ad supported, 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.

32:04They've always been good to me. They can have access to my content for free. Go ahead. 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.

32:18Big Technology Podcast Host:Wow. And so what does that do to like, let's say a publisher's, you know, ranking in the search algorithm? Well, again, I think my hope is that Google is going to come around and say, we're gonna have to pay for the content, because if they don't have the content, then then Google's product 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 open AI and you should care about being in Claude.

32:52And again, the vast majority of content creators, they want that, right? And so we're going to make that as easy as possible. But if you're ad supported or subscription supported, then those businesses are dying. And you've got to figure out a way to negotiate a different business. 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.

33:22Big Technology Podcast Host: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.

33:58Big Technology Podcast Host:If, you know, they sort of blocked them, that could be a big portion of their revenue. But at At this point, they've basically seen like they have very little to lose left, 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. Yeah. And that's what a seismic threat that is to Google in some ways. The whole PageRank 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 search and they can do ranking online.

34:39And so I think that they are finally recognizing that that is a systemic threat, that the business is changing. And I'm hopeful that Google, who's been this incredible patron to the Internet, has been provided more for it for the last 30 years than anyone else, that they recognize that the Internet is changing and that they should be supporting it. 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 doing it in an interesting way?

35:18And I am surprised that Google has dragged their feet as much 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 at a place where this is truly a golden age of contact creation.

35:40Big Technology Podcast Host:So, OK, 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. Yeah, and they've seen the revenue that Google 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.

36:14And 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 app supported or subscription supported, this is an existential threat to your business. And you've got to make sure that 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 open AI and philanthropic, but Google gets everything for free. Like it's got to be that everyone plays by the same rules. And I think we're at that tipping point where even Google is starting to realize that the economics of the Internet are changing.

36:47The 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, OK, but that's 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.

37:15I'm way more optimistic for media companies today than I was a year ago. And I really think that 2026 is gonna be the year that in the media space, in the content space, that you're gonna see a real shift and then content creators are gonna 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 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.

37:49I 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, um, Vogue, like they deserve their content creators that deserve to get paid the same way that some, you know, influencer on YouTube does.

38:07Big Technology Podcast Host:So you think Google's going to pay up before this deadline? I don't know if they'll pay up before the deadline, but I think it's inevitable that they'll pay out. Because again, I think that they need the content and they understand fundamentally that journalists and content creators and academics deserve to eat. How many of your clients do you think will actually go ahead with the blocking of these AI crawlers? I'm talking about not your whole client base, but just the news publishers. Just the folks who are ad supported. So again, we've done this. If you're not ad supported, none of this applies to you.

38:42Like you can set the numbers you want. If you're ad supported by default, starting mid-September, we're going to switch this over. And you can, anyone can opt out. But we expect that the vast, vast majority of people that have ad or subscription supported, businesses 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 on AI crawlers. So right now, it's basically put sort of a no trespassing sign in the stock line and say, don't come and get this content. And most people are actually pretty good at respecting the no trespassing sign.

39:17Starting in mid-September, we're going to actually make it not just a no trespassing sign, but we're actually going to basically put a bouncer there saying, unless you're compensating creators, you don't get this content.

39:28Big Technology Podcast Host:Millions of sites could drop out of Google's ranking. Correct. That's a big deal. 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 and that makes that makes everyone worse off including google okay so big 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 uh you know way to browse and interact and and do commerce then potentially small businesses are at risk.

40:33Big Technology Podcast Host:So we're going to hear Matthew's perspective on that when we come back right after this. One thing I've learned covering AI is that efficiency isn't the same thing as good work. You can automate plenty of individual tasks, but you still need the right context and a clear sense of what you're trying to accomplish. And that's what I like about Notion. I use Notion to keep big technologies, episode planning, and materials in one place, while also tracking editorial work. Having everything connected gives me one place to see what I'm working on and keep things moving. Notion is the AI workspace where your team's knowledge, projects, and agents all come together in one place.

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43:30Big Technology Podcast Host:Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. 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 articulate than the way that I just described it. So can you explain sort of what the stakes are for small businesses again as this trend continues to progress and we go to a web that's so much more bot than it is human?

44:08Yeah. So, you know, I think, 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 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 and understanding what the risks are and then trying to figure out what the solution is.

44:39The world that I'm trying to play for is one where there's not five AI companies, there's 500 ,000. There's not a tiny number of content creators that everyone can be a content creator and put something out. 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 uh going 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 let me walk through what i think is the problem so in order to understand think about your your small business let's say you're starting something to be a new um you know b2c a dtc a direct to consumer uh brand i don't know you're making i don't know new light bulbs or makeup or who knows what what possibly it is what do you do in order to reach customers the answer is you go on something like instagram or a 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 maybe you raise 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.

46:05And 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. 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 whatever 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.

46:40So 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 and know what the experience is going to be when I, 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 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 affiliate to Marriott Hotel.

47:17so 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 gonna 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 i think that's a really interesting and hard problem because the The agents have infinite time to research every possible detail.

47:49And 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 very efficiently. But how does my local farmer find a way to actually reach this?

48:26Because 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.

48:56And over time, like I was meeting with the former CEO of PayPal, who before that ran small business at Intuit. 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 that ships things in an AI company. And obviously that's, 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, 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.

49:32And it's like, you know, we, As a kid, I watched it. 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. 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 shopping at, like, the local bodega?

50:02Of 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 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 back.

50:33Big Technology Podcast Host:house can i give the counter argument uh and that is that brand is actually something that uh favors the big companies over the small companies because they have the money to spend and so like you might be much more uh 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 uh research them you just say okay hey, I'm going to Target. I'm going to buy Nike as opposed to whatever. The new, I think that might be right if you can get that. But the question is, how do you, and that's the happy story. And that's what we want to get to.

51:09But 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 agente 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 chargebacks happen to it? How do we aggregate all that information, 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.

51:53I 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, 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?

52:39Because 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 what I think you described 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 articulate it and then figure out what are the solutions to that problem. Okay.

53:07Big Technology Podcast Host: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 the 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 you've discussed so far like i um 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 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 i think we're trying to just gather as much information i don't think we're going to solve the problem but i i hope that we can be a part of the solution the problem 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 to be influenced by any ads at all.

54:41You 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. And so that's the next problem that we have. 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 building is one that is as utopian and not dystopian as possible.

55:08Big Technology Podcast Host:Yeah, well, 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. See you back here next year. And I'll tell you what the solution for small businesses is. Okay. It is a deal. It is a deal. All right. Thank you so much for joining, Matthew. Great to have you on. Thanks for having me. All right. Thanks, everybody, for listening and watching. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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