NEW DELHI: The increasing use of AI language models for information retrieval and agent commerce is straining existing internet business models as these companies are crushing publishers, content creators and small businesses, said Matthew Prince, chief executive officer of internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare. On this issue, he said that for the past 10 years, individuals and creators, including researchers and small businesses, have been selling subscriptions or showing ads in exchange for their work. But now, AI models collect and regurgitate information, eliminating direct interaction between creators and users. “Google has been a great patron, but now things have changed. “For the past 10 years, Google has sent back one human visitor for every two pages scraped on the internet. Currently, only one copy is sent for every 30 pages. Getting traffic from Google search is now 15 times more difficult. Microsoft’s performance is even worse, sending 70 to 1. If you look at pure AI companies, OpenAI pulls 37,000 pages from the internet for every visitor. For Anthropic, that’s 500,000 pages,” he said. Cloudflare handles nearly 20% of internet traffic and works with all base model providers. “Human gaze traffic, the current currency of the internet, is disappearing. It will never be the same again. We are getting more answers from AI than from original sources, so we have to come up with new ways to compensate creators,” he said. Prince said the world needs to find new business models for the Internet and develop new reward systems that go beyond traffic.
