Cloudflare CEO warns AI and zero-click internet are killing the web's business model

[midian182]

In context: AI and zero-click searches are killing the business model of the web that has sustained content creators for the last 15+ years. It's an opinion that is shared by many, including Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who recently warned that "search drives everything that happens online."

It's been known for some time that the web is changing into the Zero-Click Internet, the name for when users no longer need to click on links to find whatever content they want.

Social media sites stopped promoting posts with links years ago, posting content directly on the platforms so users don't have to leave them. With the advent of generative AI, people are having their queries answered directly on Google's search page – no need to click on a website to find an answer.

Must read: The Zero Click Internet

Prince, boss of the CDN/security giant Cloudflare, spoke about the impact of a zero-click Internet during a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations. "AI is going to fundamentally change the business model of the web. The business model of the web for the last 15 years has been search. Search drives everything that happens online," he said.

Prince also talked about how the value exchange between Google and those who create web content is disappearing. He noted that almost a decade ago, every two pages that Google scraped meant it would send websites a visitor. Today, it takes six scraped pages to get one visitor, despite the crawl rate not changing.

"Today, 75 percent of the queries get answered without you leaving Google," the CEO revealed.

The graph below explains zero-click searches and where those clicks go, but this was before AI overviews which is likely to cut those publisher clicks in half (again).

The rise of large language models and the AI companies behind them has sent the crisis into overdrive, pushing the scraping-to-visitor ratio far above Google's six to one. As such, creators see lower returns – and with so much AI scraping of content without permission, they often get nothing at all for their work.

"And so the business model of the web can't survive unless there's some change, because more and more the answers to the questions that you ask won't lead you to the original source, it will be some derivative of that source."

New: How AI Overviews Shift Traffic From Publishers to Google

It's not enough that Google's AI Overviews reduce clicks to publisher websites 📉

Google designed these so that what few clicks remain lead to walls of irrelevant ads and/or bad search results

Link in 🧵 pic.twitter.com/usrycPvTNS

– Cyrus (@CyrusShepard) May 8, 2025

While some will argue that being able to find an answer quickly and from multiple sources without clicking through several sites is easier and more convenient, there are obvious problems.

The main issue is that nobody is going to want to create new content when they get paid nothing or almost nothing for doing so. This is especially true when it comes to smaller, independent, impartial sites that AI companies might not partner with. And let's not forget how often AI gets things completely wrong.

"Sam Altman at OpenAI and others get that. But he can't be the only one paying for content when everyone else gets it for free."

Prince said that 80 percent of AI companies use Cloudflare, and 20 to 30 percent of the web uses its services. He added that as his company is at the center of the problem, it is thinking about ways to address the situation, hopefully before it is too late.

The executive also talked about the billions of dollars being invested in generative AI and the lack of returns.

"In terms of, is AI a fad, is it overhyped? I think the answer is probably yes and no. I would guess that 99 percent of the money that people are spending on these projects today is just getting lit on fire. But 1 percent is going to be incredibly valuable. And I can't tell you what 1 percent of that is. And so maybe we've all got a light, you know, $100 on fire to find that one dollar that matters."

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Cloudflare CEO warns AI and zero-click internet are killing the web's business model

 

[pnntmp]

A business model based on tracking, privacy intrusions, endless annoyances, selling user data, search engine spam ... and Google as a Censorship HQ .. I'll definitely not miss that.

 

[seeprime]

AI summaries aren't always correct. Often, they're absurd. I'll stick with clicks on actual links, especially for medical and other important information that the AI summaries can really provide terrible results.

 

[Dr Roboto]

I don't know how to feel. Google, Bing, etc. currently suck at searching the internet. So much advertising and SEO have ruined the good old fashion search approach. Search used to work, but now I just get junk. Things have drastically changed over the last 5-10 years.

The new alternative is AI summary of the internet that is right about 60% of the time, and hallucinates the other 40%. Worst of all, if people really do stop finding value in creating webpages, then exactly were does AI get is data to train on?

The future is bleak.

 

[VaRmeNsI]

Apparently search was intentionally made worse to get people to stay on it looking for links.

They may have made some short-term profit but now they've opened themselves up to being replaced.

 

[p51d007]

As long as my ad blocker works, and allows me to white list sites I visit (like this one), they can do anything they want.

 

[ThomasTECH]

Welcome to the world of IT did any other segment of IT not get Overhauled in the last 5-10 years? The Web companies just need to evolve like we all have to. Say good by to your weekends...

 

[ZedRM]

AI needs to be highly regulated and/or banned. This is disruptive and harmful.

 

[brucek]

Not too worried.

Before the internet was commercialized, there was Usenet and there were non-commercial hobby sites. And at least for the technical topics I was interested in, they were often excellent. Concise, organized, and well-vetted since, I.e., every Perl programmer was working from the same Perl FAQ, etc. If there was a mistake it was caught quickly. If I wanted to learn something about a new game, I could get it in an organized FAQ that covered everything, and not have to watch a 10 minute video to learn one small point. And no one was paid or wanted to be.

If AI was trained from usenet FAQs at their prime vs say Reddit, it'd probably be a lot smarter.

 

[daffy duck]

As long as my ad blocker works, and allows me to white list sites I visit (like this one), they can do anything they want.

So that rules out 99% of browsers after manifest V3 is compulsory in a few months, leaving Safari and Firefox.

Death to Chrome and Google.

 

[AnilD]

The real existential crisis isn’t just for media or blogs—it’s for the idea that quality information can sustainably exist online without either a paywall or a corporate sugar daddy. And if AI is just remixing the past, who’s actually making the future?

 

[Liranan]

I don't know how to feel. Google, Bing, etc. currently suck at searching the internet. So much advertising and SEO have ruined the good old fashion search approach. Search used to work, but now I just get junk. Things have drastically changed over the last 5-10 years.

The new alternative is AI summary of the internet that is right about 60% of the time, and hallucinates the other 40%. Worst of all, if people really do stop finding value in creating webpages, then exactly were does AI get is data to train on?

The future is bleak.

From my brief encounters with these models I have concluded that they are absolutely terrible. Even if they are 60% correct the data they spew out needs to be double and triple checked to make sure they don't make stuff up.

Fortunately I use them mostly for D&D and their answers are sometimes so bad that they aren't worth using. Grok, generally speaking, gives some decent answers but even then it needs to be checked to ensure that answers aren't terrible, wasting time and energy.

 

[Vanderlinde]

So that rules out 99% of browsers after manifest V3 is compulsory in a few months, leaving Safari and Firefox.

Death to Chrome and Google.

You can still use Adblock based DNS services,

There's quite a few good ones out there.

A VPN helps protecting against advertisements as well. It just blocks the DNS queries the browser is making. Far more effective then the V3 adblockers out there.

With V3 it still renders the ads, and removes them once the ads are generated. Google extremely clever in what they do.

 

[FF222]

A business model based on tracking, privacy intrusions, endless annoyances, selling user data, search engine spam ... and Google as a Censorship HQ .. I'll definitely not miss that.

Beating a straw man when you can't argue with the original argument. Never works out. Facts don't care about your feelings.

 

[p51d007]

So that rules out 99% of browsers after manifest V3 is compulsory in a few months, leaving Safari and Firefox.

Death to Chrome and Google.

I don't use a browser plugin. It's a separate program to block them.

 

[subnex]

My main issue is that stuff that could be googled (or duck duck goed) in seconds a few years ago currently requires more effort and search query modificstions. SEO sites are attrocious, but stackoverflow reddit and other results tend not to appear in the first 5 to 10 queries and if they do, it's often old content with deleted posts (reddit) etc.
Searching for proper product reviews is impossible with all stores having their own "customer reviews". Most travel tip blogs read like they are ai generated or pure promotion rather than actual tips and insights....
Clicking on a link in a facebook more often than not just opens facebook again rather than the link unless you use the app...

The internet is going to sh!t

 

[FF222]

My main issue is that stuff that could be googled (or duck duck goed) in seconds a few years ago currently requires more effort and search query modificstions.

Google is not in the "here's what you searched for" business. Google is in the "here's an ad for you business". The harder Google it makes for you to find what you were searching for, the more ads can it show to you and the more money it makes.

 

[jeffwhelpley]

I don't know how to feel. Google, Bing, etc. currently suck at searching the internet. So much advertising and SEO have ruined the good old fashion search approach. Search used to work, but now I just get junk. Things have drastically changed over the last 5-10 years.

The new alternative is AI summary of the internet that is right about 60% of the time, and hallucinates the other 40%. Worst of all, if people really do stop finding value in creating webpages, then exactly were does AI get is data to train on?

The future is bleak.

Great comment and I largely agree, but two points. One is that while the quality of AI responses is not perfect now, you would be foolish to think they won't be able to improve that significantly over time. If it does stay the same, then yeah....it will suck to have to struggle with AI slop on a constant basis. But I would bet that this is just issues since we are starting out on this tech and over time the quality will greatly improve.

Second point is that I do wonder if a search engine similar to Google circa 2005 (I.e. minimal ads, high quality links that are mostly accurate) is even possible today. The high quality of that time period was at least particular due to Google's technology far outpacing spammers. These days, the level of sophistication among spammers is so high that it may be nearly impossible to replicate that level of quality. Also, the costs associated with trying to achieve that level of quality would likely be so high in today's world that the minimal ads shown on that 2005 Google interface wouldn't come close to coving the costs.

 

[FF222]

One is that while the quality of AI responses is not perfect now, you would be foolish to think they won't be able to improve that significantly over time.

Foolish is to think they will be able to significantly improve on that. They won't.

For one, because all the low hanging fruit training material has already been used, and there's no more. It would take another 20-50-1000 years to generate the same amount of training data that's been used - but the problem is, that now human create data and AI generated data are virtually impossible to distinguish (and will be even more so in the future), which leads to model collapse.

Theoretically it would be possible to improve answers further using expert training, but that would cost a fortune (and would not scale anyway) when AI is already a loss leader and is not able to pay for itself even when all the training material was free, or at least wasn't paid for (in violation of copyright laws).

The other thing is that AI can't improve itself because it's not actually intelligent, it does not understand anything it says - that's why it can easily contradict itself even in the same sentence.

 

[cyberblogger]

Well I tell you what went on, since cloudflair is one of the "noobies"

1. The dot com bubble hit. So people everywhere made a bunch of servers and data systems for people to write web pages.
2. The 'corporate web hosting model' was launched in existence, then the battle between small business hosting and corporate hosting began. Corporate had millions of dollars to advertise on national television and radio as well as youtube offering content managers such as wordpress and of course offer you extra web integrations like 365 office, etc but what you get is very poor programming through a cms that may have security flaws. Since these content managers don't publish the site in the same manner as a standard web site, they all get ignored or put on a b list that later will come back and scan for a proper xml tree if it detected it. Then later, they used search optimization as a paid feature which actually all it did was make a good xml file so the site can index on the 'B' List.

A lot of people are bumped in search results because these 'corporate hosting' companies pushed content managers like wordpress and dupral in advertising for years against the small business guy who had the same services, that just didn't advertise on the scale. Because they are a poor product. They don't conform to standard web coding, so a search spider is going to ignore it. Yes, you can make a pretty looking site very quickly, but since its generated by a database, its not going to index.

These cloudflair people have a bad product that came out called the bot check. Some sites I can't goto, or have to do something dumb like a puzzle, or move a slider. Which doesn't always work. I call it bad code because its not going to stop a botnet. I hope no one is really paying for that.