The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 39 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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: 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.”
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: 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 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…”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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.”
Prince: California courts issued contradictory rulings on AI training fair use
“We literally had two different California cases that came out on both sides of that issue. Is, Training on content fair use or not.”
Prince: AI will generate hyper-customized podcasts in personalized voices
“We're going to want to have hyper-customized podcasts that are in exactly the voice that we find the most reassuring and AIs are going to create that for us.”
Prince: 80% of AI companies are Cloudflare customers
“80% of the AI companies are our customers of ours, and so, so we project them as well.”
Prince: Google crawl rate has stayed consistent over 10 years
“And we have very reliable data at Cloudflare going back 10 years, looking just at Google and the metric that has stayed very consistent over time is how much Google crawls the web. They've actually crawled at a very consistent rate over the last 10 years.”