Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince claims the internet infrastructure company’s efforts to block AI crawlers are already seeing big results.
The action comes after the company announced a Content Independence Day in July—an initiative with prominent publishers and AI firms to block AI crawlers by default on content creators’ work unless the AI companies pay for access.
Since July 2024, Cloudflare has offered customers tools to block AI bots from scraping their content. Cloudflare told WIRED that the number of AI bots blocked since July 1, 2025 is 416 billion. “The business model of the internet has always been to generate content that drives traffic and then sell either things, subscriptions, or ads,” Prince told WIRED’s executive editor, Brian Barrett. “What I think people don't realize, though, is that AI is a platform shift. The business model of the internet is about to change dramatically. I don't know what it's going to change to, but it's what I'm spending almost every waking hour thinking about.” As a company, Cloudflare’s offerings are geared toward making it faster and safer to access content online. But as the AI industry has exploded and AI giants have emerged, Prince says he’s become increasingly focused on how Cloudflare can leverage its position to discourage consolidation and safeguard the internet as a place where businesses and creators of every size can survive—or, ideally, thrive. “We need to be able to make sure that businesses large and small flourish on a fair playing ground,” Prince said. “That is the future that we're trying to play for. That's the best thing for our business, because that's more people to be customers of ours. That's more internet for us to be able to protect.” Prince specifically highlighted concerns about Google’s policies around its search and AI crawlers. As a major AI player jostling for dominance, Google combined its search and AI crawlers into one, so blocking its AI scraper also blocks a site’s ability to be indexed in Google search. The move has put content creators in a bind, because they don’t want AI models to train on their creations, but they typically need their place in Google search to help audiences find their material. “You can't opt out of one without opting out of both, which is a real challenge—it's crazy,” Prince said. “It shouldn't be that you can use your monopoly position of yesterday in order to leverage and have a monopoly position in the market of tomorrow.” Prince cites stats that Cloudflare has not previously shared publicly about how much more of the internet Google can see compared to other companies like OpenAI and Anthropic or even Meta and Microsoft. Prince says Cloudflare found that Google currently sees 3.2 times more pages on the internet than OpenAI, 4.6 times more than Microsoft, and 4.8 times more than Anthropic or Meta does. Put simply, “They have this incredibly privileged access,” Prince says. Publishers and other content creators have seen promising results when they block AI crawlers, Prince adds. He argues that creative, original human thought still has immense potential value and urgency for AI companies looking to ever-expand their models, whether these insights come from local news outlets that know all the regional details or Reddit users brain dumping their deepest—or silliest—ideas. And this creates the potential for licensing deals and other paid content to be at least the germ of a viable business model for creators long term. Ultimately, Prince notes that regulation may be a necessary intervention. In the meantime, Cloudflare is working to apply pressure wherever it can to drive evolution of AI business models that are pluralistic and expand markets, rather than concentrating and centralizing them. Prince argues that while this aligns with founding tenets of the open internet, it’s also just good business for everyone. “It's almost like a Marvel movie—the hero of the last film becomes the villain of the next one,” he said. “Google is the problem here. It is the company that is keeping us from going forward on the internet, and until we force them—or hopefully convince them—that they should play by the same rules as everyone else and split their crawlers up between search and AI, I think we're going to have a hard time completely locking all the content down.”
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