Last month at the Cannes Lions festival, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince delivered a stark warning (and some hope) for content creators and businesses with a digital presence: artificial intelligence tools are now scraping more content than ever—while sending back fewer visitors than at any point in internet history.
With Cloudflare handling around 20% of global internet traffic, Prince’s observations carry real weight. It’s an issue we’re keeping a close eye on, given the direct implications for how businesses approach their websites, content, and digital strategy.
From Crawling to Consumption: What’s Changed
In a revealing interview with Axios at Cannes, Prince shared some telling figures that highlight just how much the balance has shifted in the last decade.
Ten years ago, Google crawled approximately two pages for every user it sent to a site. That ratio has ballooned:
- Google now crawls 18 pages per visitor
- OpenAI crawls 1,500 pages per visitor
- Anthropic crawls a staggering 60,000 pages per visitor
These numbers suggest a fundamental shift in the web’s value exchange. Traditional search engines like Google still send users to the source of the content. But the new generation of AI tools—designed to summarise, rephrase or respond using web content—consume vastly more and refer almost nothing back.
This is what Prince calls the rise of the “zero-click ecosystem.” When someone asks an AI tool a question and gets a complete answer—synthesised from thousands of websites—they’re far less likely to click through to the original source. The value extracted isn’t returned.
“We’ve entered the zero-click ecosystem,” Prince said. “People aren’t following the footnotes anymore.”
Why This Matters to Creatives, Publishers and Content-Led Businesses
For many businesses, particularly those in creative, publishing or media sectors, the website plays a central role—whether it’s generating leads, housing a portfolio, driving newsletter signups, or monetising through ads or subscriptions.
But in an AI-driven browsing experience, those business models come under pressure.
- If users never reach your site, engagement metrics drop.
- Ad revenue declines as impressions and clicks fall.
- Leads dry up if visitors bypass your carefully structured funnel.
- And perhaps most critically, your content is still being used—just not in ways you control, track or benefit from.
This isn’t just a theoretical concern. The ratios shared by Cloudflare show that AI systems are already behaving very differently from traditional web crawlers. They’re not just indexing content—they’re actively absorbing it for direct delivery to users.
Watch the full video below
In this conversation with Axios’ Sara Fischer, Prince unpacks the data and discusses what Cloudflare is doing to address the imbalance.
Industry Response: Blocking, Monitoring and Licensing
To help publishers and content owners respond, Cloudflare is rolling out a suite of tools designed to protect content from unwanted or unauthorised scraping.
These include:
- Crawler blocking: Tools to automatically stop AI bots that ignore no-crawl directives in robots.txt files or meta-tags
- AI honeypots: Decoy pages that identify and flag bad actors
- Audit dashboards: Allowing businesses to see which bots are accessing their sites, how often, and in what ways
- Pay-per-crawl models: A framework for content owners to licence AI access, ensuring that scraping is both transparent and compensated
Some of these features are already being used by major media organisations. Others, like pay-per-crawl, are still in development—but point to a future where content access is more balanced and rights-respecting.
As a team that helps businesses manage and optimise their Cloudflare setup, we see this as an important step forward. The open web was never meant to be a free-for-all for commercial AI scraping. Tools like this help restore much-needed control and accountability for content creators and site owners alike.
What Should Businesses Be Thinking About?
Even if your company doesn’t consider itself a publisher, this trend matters. Any business with a digital footprint—especially one that invests in blogs, guides, product pages or original creative work—needs to understand how AI changes the rules.
Here are a few questions to start asking:
- Are AI bots scraping your site, and do you want them to?
- Is your content being used by AI tools without attribution?
- Could changes in referral traffic be linked to AI summarisation?
- Do you need to revisit your robots.txt settings or crawler policies?
It’s early days, but the direction of travel is clear: AI tools are here to stay, and they’re rewriting how content is consumed. Businesses that understand and adapt to these dynamics early will be better positioned to protect their assets and explore new value models.
Looking Ahead
This isn’t about shutting down innovation—it’s about ensuring the digital economy remains sustainable for the businesses that feed it. As part of Dr Logic’s innovation focus, we’ll continue to monitor how AI reshapes the web, and what it means for our clients.
If you produce content—whether as part of a campaign, a portfolio, or your core business model—now is the time to pay attention.
