Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince explains how publishers alerted Cloudflare that AI web crawling was behaving like accidental DDoS attacks on their infrastructure.
“Starting really 18 months ago is that those companies said, hey, I know we hired you in order to stop the Chinese hackers, but we have this new threat that's there... And it was only when we actually saw the data and we saw how AI companies were taking content without giving anything of value in return, that they were actually adding enormous amounts of load. And in some cases taking whole websites down because of the amount of traffic that they were sending to it.”
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More from Matthew Prince
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Prince: Earning traffic from OpenAI is 750x harder than Google historically
“In OpenAI's case, it's 750 times harder to get traffic than it was from Google just 10, 10, 10 years ago. In the case of something like Anthropic, it's 30,000 times more, more difficult to get that traffic.”
Matthew PrinceAug 13, 2025▶ 4:02Can We Save The Web From AI? — With Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince
AssertionSupported
Prince: Anthropic's 60,000-to-1 crawl-to-click ratio means publishers are completely dead
“I think they're dead at 250 or 1500 to one that we're seeing with OpenAI and completely dead at 60,000 to one that we're seeing with something like Anthropic.”
Matthew PrinceAug 13, 2025▶ 8:28Can We Save The Web From AI? — With Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince
Disclosure
Prince: Cloudflare will block Google scrapers for publishers starting in September
“And what we have said at cloudflare is that by mid September, we're gonna treat Google the same way on. If you have an, you know, ads, if you're a business that's ad supported, subscription supported, then we're going to restrict Google from being able to acce…”
Matthew PrinceSep 2, 2026▶ 30:05Cloudflare CEO: We're Ready To Block Millions of Websites From AI — With Matthew Prince
Disclosure
Cloudflare announces hard-blocking AI crawlers unless they pay creators
“And then just today on July first, we announced that we are hard blocking the AI crawlers unless they will actually compensate Content creators for the content that they're creating.”
Matthew PrinceAug 13, 2025▶ 4:42Can We Save The Web From AI? — With Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince
AssertionSupported
Prince: Automated web traffic surpassed human traffic for first time in 2026
“In May of 2026, you won't believe it, but we now see that automated traffic is past human traffic for the first time in the history of the internet.”
Matthew PrinceSep 2, 2026▶ 2:16Cloudflare CEO: We're Ready To Block Millions of Websites From AI — With Matthew Prince
Opinion
Prince: App stores and Facebook damaged the open web
“And the app store in some ways was an enormous threat to the web. Like it took people away from the web. It was probably one of the biggest, between it and Facebook were like the two biggest forces that really made the web less interesting.”
Matthew PrinceSep 2, 2026▶ 6:44Cloudflare CEO: We're Ready To Block Millions of Websites From AI — With Matthew Prince
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