Almost 30 years ago, two graduate students at Stanford University (Larry Page and Sergei Blin) began working on a research project called BackRub. Of course, it was a project that brought Google. But more than that: it created a business model for the web.
The deals Google had done with content creators were easy. Copy content for search. Sends traffic. As a content creator, you can derive value from that traffic in one of three ways: You can run ads against it, sell subscriptions, and get the joy of knowing that someone is consuming yours.
Google has encouraged all of this. Search for generated traffic. They got DoubleClick and built AdSense to help content creators serve their ads. You can get sea urchins and launch Google Analytics to measure who is viewing content at any time.
For almost 30 years, the relationship has defined the web and allowed it to flourish.
But the relationship is changing. For the first time in its history, the number of searches performed on Google has decreased. What's replacing it? ai.
If you're like me, you've been surprised by the new AI systems launched over the past two years and have found yourself turning to them to answer questions that you might have previously looked at Google in the past. It's still too early, but it's clear that the web's future interface looks more like ChatGpt than Spartan's search box or the blue links in 10.
Google itself has been changed. I presented a list of links 10 years ago and stated that I was able to get away from the site as quickly as possible, but today I added an answer box and more recently an AI overview that answers users' questions without leaving Google.com. Using the answer box, we reported that 75% of the queries were answered without the user leaving Google. The AI overview gets even higher with recent releases.
Google users may like it, but it hurts content creators. Google still copies the creator's content, but over the past decade, changes to the “search” UI have made it almost ten times more difficult for content creators to get the same amount of traffic. This means it's ten times more difficult to generate value from the ego of advertising, subscriptions, or knowing someone.
And that's good news. It's even worse Today's AI Tools. With Openai, it's 750 times more difficult to get traffic than Google of Old. It's artificial, and it's 30,000 times more difficult. The reason is simple. More and less original consumption. Consuming derivatives.
The question is whether to sell ads, sell subscriptions, or create content to help people know they value what they create. AI-driven Web does not reward content creators with the old search-driven Web methods. And that means that the transactions Google made to take content in exchange for sending traffic no longer make sense.
Instead of being fair trade, the web is stripped by AI crawlers who admit that it's pretty much worthless because content creators see little traffic.
That's what we call Content Independence Day today, July 1st. CloudFlare, along with most of the world's leading publishers and AI companies, has changed its default to block AI crawlers unless you pay creators for content. It is fair that content creators are directly compensated, as it is the fuel that powers the AI engine.
But that's just the beginning. Next, we will work in a market where content creators and AI companies, large and small, come together. Traffic has always been a low value proxy. I think we can do better. Let me explain.
Imagine an AI engine like a block of Swiss cheese. New original content filling one of the holes in the cheese blocks of AI engines is more valuable than the repetitive, less valuable content that unfortunately dominates much of the web today.
We believe that, not how much traffic it generates, but how much knowledge it promotes (measured by how much it fills the current hole in the AI engine's “Swiss cheese” and that once you start scoring content and gaining value, it will not only help the AI engine get better faster, but also help to promote a new golden age of potentially high value content.
We don't know all the answers yet, but we work with some of the leading economists and computer scientists to understand them.
The web is changing. That business model will change. And along the way, we have the opportunity to learn about the great things about the web of the past 30 years and what can be better for the web of the future.
CloudFlare's mission is to help you build a better internet. As the web evolves, we are proud of the role we play in doing just that. And we are proud to help content creators stick and demand value from the content they work hard to create.
Happy Content Independence Day!
