When Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince first started getting calls from distressed publishers about the threat of AI crawlers scraping their content, his knee-jerk reaction was to roll his eyes.
And honestly, a little eye-rolling is fair — Cloudflare’s day job is fending off botnets and nation-state cyberattacks, not debating how Google and other AI companies crawl publisher sites. That means any AI-focused crawling the company tracks represents a narrow slice of the overall traffic and data the cloud-edge company processes. “I remember being like, why is the media always so afraid of the next new technology?” he recalls.
But when publishers continued to press him, he pulled the data — and that’s when the scale and urgency of the problem snapped into focus for him. He was shocked. He could see that the business model of digital publishing was dissolving.
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