The Ledger
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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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Prince: Google Paying Publishers for AI Scraping Is Inevitable
“I don't know if they'll pay up before the deadline, but I think it's inevitable that they'll pay up. Because again, I think that they need the content and they understand fundamentally that journalists and content creators and academics deserve to eat.”
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.”
Prince: Automated Web Traffic Will Be 1,000x Human Traffic Within Five Years
“And if we just assume the current trends, what's, what's blows my mind is that if you just fast forward five years from now we estimate now that automated traffic online will be a thousand times what human traffic is.”
Prince: The tech ecosystem will move away from the app store model
“I do think that we're going to move more and more away from kind of an app store model. Because that's not going to be the interface where we reconnect with it.”
Prince: Defining internet monetization is tech's most important question
“Over the next five years, figuring out what the business model of the next 30 years of the internet, like, that's the most interesting and important question in technology today, by far.”
Prince: Universal containerized AI agents require 40x global annual CPU production
“If every one of those agents ran in a traditional container, like, you know, which is not even a VM, not even its own server, but just a container, right? You would need more than 40 times the current CPU production in an, in a calendar year in order to suppor…”
Prince: AI micropayments must scale beyond 100 million transactions per second
“We think that somewhere between one and 10% of those will day one be monetizable through agents with a 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 o…”
Prince: 2026 Will Be the Year Media Creators Get Paid by AI
“I really think that 2026 is going to be the year that in the media space, in the content space, that you're going to see a real shift and then content creators are going to get paid.”
Prince: AI Purchasing Agents Will Systematically Favor Incumbent Mega-Corporations
“The agents have infinite time to research every possible detail. And 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.”
Prince: Ad-free AI agents will widen the global wealth divide
“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 if we're not in an ad based business model in anymore, which I think is likely if you're spending thousands of d…”
Prince: Google search query volumes are declining for the first time
“What we're seeing though, is that for the first time in history, searches across the major search engines, Google in particular, are actually on the decline.”
Prince: Getting a referral click from Google is 10x harder today
“Today, it's almost 10 times as hard to get a click, to get a visitor from Google to your site.”
Prince: 75% of Google search queries are answered without a click
“In fact, about 75% of queries to Google now get answered on Google itself.”
Prince: AI-driven web will cause media consolidation and reduced content
“Again, I think that that's just going to mean that over time we'll have more consolidation in the media industry. We'll have less and less content. We'll have actually more salacious headlines as people are chasing The content that is, is left that's out there…”
Prince: Google's AI Overviews pushed its crawl-to-click ratio to 18:1
“The ratio 10 years ago of crawls from Google to clicks was two crawls, one click. Six months ago, it was up to six crawls one click, and that's all because of the answer box. What the AI overviews, which they've rolled out over that time, have done is they've …”
Prince: Strangling publisher incentives will eventually degrade AI systems
“If we strangle off the business model of those places, if we strangle off the incentives for content to create for content creators to create content, then we're actually going to end up strangling the AI systems as well, because there's, if there's no content…”
Prince: Strangling creator incentives will ultimately hurt AI companies
“In order for AI to get better, you have to have original content. People have to be going out and creating that. And right now we're strangling off all of the incentives for that content creation, which not only hurts content creators, it will ultimately hurt …”
Prince: AI bots should pay heavily for content so humans read free
“Humans should get content for free again, because we've kind of paywalled way too much, frankly. And robots should pay a ton for it. Because again, every time a robot ingests something, it's in service of, Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of different hu…”
Prince: AI will eliminate creator subscription revenue by summarizing podcasts
“That will go away as well, because what will happen is the AI company will ingest the podcast and then summarize it on, on their page.”
Prince: AI web scrapers brought down entire publisher websites with traffic
“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…”
Cloudflare blocks AI bots by default on monetized or paywalled web pages
“What we've done is we've actually tried to identify with real narrow precision. What are those pages that are on the web that have some indication that they are going to be monetized. And generally that is look at, is it behind a paywall or is it, does it have…”
Prince: Major legitimate companies completely ignore robots.txt
“And there's some just, there's some, even some big legitimate companies that completely ignore robots.txt.”
Prince: Google uses a single crawler for search, ads, and Gemini
“Google's crawler does five different things, at least. One is it checks if you have an ad on a page. It makes sure that if you're putting an ad for Procter & Gamble, Procter & Gamble product up, it's not against a pornographic site or something like that. So i…”
Prince: Cloudflare is adopting the HTTP 402 code to charge AI bots
“There's actually an original one of the protocols set out a four or two response and that response says payment required. And so we're actually tapping into that exact original specification to say when a robot tries to access, access a page, Where there's an …”
Prince: Crawler paywalls will create a dynamic marketplace for content
“And so that's the sort of thing where I think a marketplace over time can develop where original valuable content will get compensated and there will be a clearing price in the market once we have that scarcity that's created by that wall.”
Prince: Global regulators will force Google to split its web crawler
“I am also a hundred percent certain that regulators are paying a ton of attention to this. And that around the world, you will see them force Google to split their crawler out into announcing exactly what it is doing.”
Prince: Open web content growth has plateaued amid fewer domain registrations
“By all the measures that we can see, it's actually kind of plateaued and is actually flattened out in terms of in terms of content. You see fewer domains getting registered. You see fewer new websites going online.”
Prince: 99 percent of AI spending is currently being lit on fire
“I believe today that 99 out of, cents out of every dollar spent on AI is just being lit on fire. But that one cent that's out there Is gonna generate real returns.”
Prince: AI support agents and lawyers lag coding due to lack of debuggers
“On the other hand, you know, I am, I, I'm still quite skeptical that the AI customer support agent that, that is a much harder problem or the AI lawyer that is a much harder problem because it's just harder to tell whether something actually worked or didn't. …”
Prince: Compensating creators via AI access will revitalize the web
“I think now putting things on back on the web and then making sure that they're accessible across the different AI systems in a way that makes sense for creators and make sure that creators get compensated is going to be something which actually I think will r…”
Prince: European internet neared collapse as traffic doubled during COVID
“The internet, European internet came this close to completely collapsing in COVID because in COVID over a period of two weeks, Internet traffic doubled, and it especially doubled for video streaming, which was, ah, which was a very high bandwidth.”
Prince: WordPress's underlying PHP technology is too inefficient for AI scale
“WordPress, most popular platform for hosting content. That's out there is running a programming language called PHP, not the most efficient programming language.”
Prince: Most companies and content creators want their content included in AI
“The majority of companies that are out there, the majority of content that's created They actually want that content in AI, like Cloudflare, like our knowledge base is a way of us sharing how to use Cloudflare really well. And we want to make sure that every A…”
Prince: Web Crawls Per Publisher Referral Click Doubled Over Past Year
“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.”
Prince: Google Crawls 2x More Web Content Than OpenAI
“Google, to give you some sense of these, more than two times as much of the web as open AI More than four times as much as Anthropic, more than five times as much as Microsoft.”
Prince: Creators make millions fulfilling unserved audio search queries on Spotify
“There are content creators out there that are making tens of millions of dollars a year just creating content for those searches that don't have good results right now, because Spotify surfaces that list of things where they don't give those results.”
Prince: Cybersecurity defenders will outpace attackers via superior AI data access
“At the end of the day, who wins in the AI risk is whoever has the access to the most data. And I just think that the good guys are always going to have access to a lot more data than the bad guys.”
Prince: Future Web Consumption Will Be Heavily Mediated by AI Interfaces
“And instead of it making the internet worse, I actually think the internet's getting better right now. It's just the interface that we're all going to consume it through is going to be very different. It's going to be much more mediated through some sort of an…”
Prince: Autonomous agent-to-agent traffic will grow into a major web category
“I think at the same time, you've got sort of agents that are operating on their own. That's probably the smallest of the categories right now. I think that that will grow and become a pretty large category, but right now that's sort of Agent to agent kind of c…”
Prince: Cloudflare Handles 500M Transactions Per Second vs Visa's 20,000
“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.”
Prince: AI crawling for training and RAG imposes bandwidth costs on publishers
“I think in both cases though, you're actually costing the content creator something. There is literally, they're paying for that traffic. They're paying for that load that the crawlers are Pulling off of it.”