Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince compares traditional payment network throughput with web traffic volume to illustrate the scaling challenges of web micropayments for AI crawling.
“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.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
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More from Matthew Prince
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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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