Cloudflare sees about 20% of the world’s internet traffic cross its network. Matthew Prince, CloudFlare’s CEO, has a pretty good handle on trending internet behavior.

In the video below, he summarizes the impact of AI “answer engines” that summarize what they find in response to questions put into AI chatbots such as Google’s AI Overview or Open AI’s Chat GPT.

What he concludes is that the exchange that allowed the search engines to index a site in return for referred pageviews is no longer equitable and is growing increasingly lopsided.

The data, according to Cloudflare;

• 10 years ago: Google crawled 2 pages per visitor
• 6 months ago: Google 6:1, OpenAI 250:1, Anthropic 6,000:1
• Present: Google 18:1, OpenAI 1,500:1, Anthropic 60,000:1

No one is saying is what we all know in our hearts. No one is clicking through to the footnoted sites on an Answer Engine. The AI crawlers are taking more than they are giving back.

It’s worth watching the entirety of Matthew’s talk in context of an announcement he references in the video. I expect it will be something related to their Bot Management suite. But I also look forward to hearing more about CloudFlare’s vision to remake the internet into one that rewards knowledge creation.

While the introduction of AI Answer Engines is a current and immediate threat to the online publishing ecosystem as we have known it, there is a nascent opportunity to re-build the internet on a new ecosystem built around different incentives.

What if we rebuilt the internet into one that rewarded Knowledge and not Attention. The “attention economy” brought us clickbait and distraction. What if we rebuilt the internet into one that rewarded publishers that gave more than they took away? Am I naive?

I am looking forward to learning more about CloudFlare’s plan.

Update: I was there!