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In a sweeping conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations, Matthew Prince – cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare – offered one of the clearest and most urgent critiques of AI’s impact on the internet economy. His message: if nothing changes, the open web may not survive.
For the last 15 years, the internet has been powered by one thing: Search. Whether you’re producing a blog, a media company, or an ecom site, chances are that 95% of your traffic (and ultimately revenue) came from Google. But Prince points out that the value exchange that sustained that model – “Google scrapes your site, then sends traffic back” – has steadily eroded.
This drastic drop in referral traffic highlights why Google leans so heavily on user engagement data in its rankings. Even as fewer users click through, Google’s NavBoost signal is quietly tracking how those users interact with search results.
Why? Because Google, OpenAI, and other AI-driven tools are now answering user queries without sending any traffic back to the sites that created the original content. Google shows the answer right in its search box. ChatGPT answers your question with no links and Claude paraphrases content with no attribution. As a result, implementing ChatGPT referral tracking becomes critical for webmasters to detect and quantify whatever traffic ChatGPT does send.
This means the economic engine that incentivized content creation – ad revenue, subscriptions, or even basic recognition – is being destroyed one AI answer at a time.
The implications are enormous:
- Writers and publishers lose their audience.
- Advertisers lose impressions.
- Search engines and AI companies keep growing – without paying for the fuel (human-created content).
This isn’t just a problem for media companies or bloggers. It’s a risk to the future of knowledge online. If AI companies train on original content but don’t drive traffic or compensate its creators, those sources will eventually disappear. The only thing left is AI to eat AI content.
Prince noted that some AI leaders – like OpenAI’s Sam Altman – understand the stakes. But even those with good intentions face a market reality: no one wants to be the only company paying for content when others scrape it for free.
Cloudflare, which sees traffic from 80% of AI companies and supports 20–30% of the web, sits in a unique position. The company is now actively thinking about how to help reset the value chain between creators and AI platforms.
Key Takeaways:
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Prince’s bottom line: the internet is under threat. Without structural changes to how AI interacts with content, we will lose what made the web work in the first place.
Cloudflare, which sits between 30% of the internet and 80% of AI traffic, finds itself right in the middle of this crisis. The next moves from Cloudflare, OpenAI, and major platforms could decide whether the internet we’ve built for decades survives – or slowly gets hollowed out.
About Matthew Prince:
Matthew Prince is cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world’s largest networks, which spans more than 330 cities in over 125 countries. Prince is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and winner of the 2011 Tech Fellow Award. Prince holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker scholar and awarded the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship. He earned his JD from the University of Chicago and BA in English literature and computer science from Trinity College. He’s also the co-creator of Project Honey Pot, the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse.
As the CEO and founder of Pubcon Inc., Brett Tabke has been instrumental in shaping the landscape of online marketing and search engine optimization. His journey in the computer industry has spanned over three decades and has made him a pioneering force behind digital evolution. Full Bio
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