The CEO of Cloudflare is shedding light on the world of AI and how negatively it's impacting the internet and the world of search.
Matthew Prince referred to it as an economic burden, and Google was outlined as the heart of disruption. This was mentioned during a recent talk about AI fundamentally altering business models online. For the past 15 years, it was all related to search as that would dictate what happens online.
The value exchange of Google with content creators continues to collapse. Nearly a decade ago, Google's scraping every two pages meant that it would send websites a visitor. You can think of it like a trade, but today, it would need six pages for a website to get a single visitor.
This drop just goes to show the growth and power of zero-click searches, which appear when anyone goes online to ask a query and, within seconds, they get the reply in front of them on Google’s page.
Today, it’s 75% of all questions that continue to get answered without anyone leaving the search engine. It’s a major trend and has long been criticized by many SEOs as well as publishers who make up the bigger concern.
AI just makes things so much worse, and LLMs are adding to this major issue. Remember, AI firms keep scraping more content for every user interaction than what we’ve seen Google do. The return for creators keeps getting worse.
This is a direct and major threat to the web, and content creators cannot keep losing out; this would see fewer unique posts from their end and more copied or reproduced material. It’s interesting how companies know what’s going on. They realize how the current online business model cannot survive until there is major change.
Cloudflare is in the middle of this major issue as it powers 80% of all AI giants and 25% of the internet. So, as per the CEO, it wants to fix whatever is broken. The problem is the cost of AI and how it’s costing others a lot of money.
If they do invest in AI, 99% of the funds are wasted, but just 1% has great value. So, for the web business model to survive, there has to be some kind of change.
Read next: Medical Experts Warn AI Chatbots Use in Diagnosing Illness Can Obscure Risks and Spread Misinformation
Matthew Prince referred to it as an economic burden, and Google was outlined as the heart of disruption. This was mentioned during a recent talk about AI fundamentally altering business models online. For the past 15 years, it was all related to search as that would dictate what happens online.
The value exchange of Google with content creators continues to collapse. Nearly a decade ago, Google's scraping every two pages meant that it would send websites a visitor. You can think of it like a trade, but today, it would need six pages for a website to get a single visitor.
This drop just goes to show the growth and power of zero-click searches, which appear when anyone goes online to ask a query and, within seconds, they get the reply in front of them on Google’s page.
Today, it’s 75% of all questions that continue to get answered without anyone leaving the search engine. It’s a major trend and has long been criticized by many SEOs as well as publishers who make up the bigger concern.
AI just makes things so much worse, and LLMs are adding to this major issue. Remember, AI firms keep scraping more content for every user interaction than what we’ve seen Google do. The return for creators keeps getting worse.
This is a direct and major threat to the web, and content creators cannot keep losing out; this would see fewer unique posts from their end and more copied or reproduced material. It’s interesting how companies know what’s going on. They realize how the current online business model cannot survive until there is major change.
Cloudflare is in the middle of this major issue as it powers 80% of all AI giants and 25% of the internet. So, as per the CEO, it wants to fix whatever is broken. The problem is the cost of AI and how it’s costing others a lot of money.
If they do invest in AI, 99% of the funds are wasted, but just 1% has great value. So, for the web business model to survive, there has to be some kind of change.
Read next: Medical Experts Warn AI Chatbots Use in Diagnosing Illness Can Obscure Risks and Spread Misinformation
