Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on AI's and Google's impact on web content (video talk)

Interesting talk: Axios’ Sara Fischer in conversation with Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince" (__https://youtu.be/H5C9EL3C82Y?feature=shared__).

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fZRbonRul9A-Veo_88WoDYtOMszsL1B_rwbMzrqFSoI/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.tjg1zt8lqmyx

Summary:
The Problem: AI and Search Engines are destroying web economics
Google created a toxic incentive system: The search giant trained content creators to chase page views and eyeballs through increasingly salacious headlines, amplifying global emotion and polarisation rather than rewarding quality information.
Traffic collapse is accelerating: Google's relationship with publishers has deteriorated dramatically—10 years ago, Google sent 1 visitor for every 2 pages scraped. Six months ago it was 1 visitor per 6 pages scraped. Today it's 1 visitor per 18 pages scraped due to AI overviews that answer queries directly without sending traffic to original sources.
AI companies are even worse: OpenAI's scrape-to-visitor ratio went from 250:1 to 1,500:1 in just 6 months. Anthropic exploded from 6,000:1 to 60,000:1 as people increasingly trusted AI summaries without clicking through to read original content, effectively stealing publishers' work without compensation.
The Solution: Collective action to create scarcity
Current AI deals are unsustainable: Publishers are making individual deals with some AI companies while letting others scrape for free, which destroys negotiating power and ensures future deals will be worse.
Cloudflare's intervention: The company is launching a solution to help publishers collectively block AI crawlers across the internet.
The Stakes Are Existential
Content creation incentives are disappearing: The three reasons people create content (money from ads/subscriptions, or fame/ego) are all being eliminated when AI provides summaries instead of driving traffic to original sources.
The internet itself is at risk: Without incentives to create original content, the web will die, taking with it free access to information that keeps democracies alive.
The Vision: A better future
Quality over clickbait: Prince envisions a fundamental shift from the current page-view economy to a system where content creators are compensated based on how much their information advances human knowledge and fills gaps in specialized AI systems, rather than chasing traffic through sensational headlines.