Free Lunch Is Over for the AI That Broke the Web
Cloudflare, a company that runs 20% of the web, just flipped a switch that could end the open internet as we know it, forcing AI companies to pay for the content they’ve been taking for free. gizmodo.com/free-lunch-i...
Free Lunch Is Over for the AI ...
The foundational deal of the modern web, a handshake agreement that powered two decades of search and content, is officially dead. Cloudflare just put a price on scraping the internet, and it’s coming for artificial intelligence’s free lunch.
“Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world’s leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content,” CEO Matthew Prince announced in a blog post.
“That content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it’s only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.” This is a sharp, aggressive turn from the web’s traditionally open access ethos. Cloudflare argues it’s long overdue.
AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s own AI Overviews are now answering user questions directly, effectively strip-mining websites for information while sending almost no traffic back to the original source.
The numbers are stark. Cloudflare claims it’s already 10 times harder to get traffic from Google than it was a decade ago due to features like the answer box. But the new AI models are far worse. According to Cloudflare’s internal metrics,
OpenAI drives 750 times less traffic than traditional Google search, while Anthropic drives a staggering 30,000 times less. The reason is simple: people are asking ChatGPT instead of Googling. The content still gets used, but the creators have been completely cut out of the value chain.
@bettycjung.bsky.social that's a really interesting difference between then and now.
The existence of seach engines (like Altavista, Yahoo search, Google search, etc) was good for creators like someone writing on a blog, because the search engnes helped other people find your blog.
In contrast, ChatGPT et al are really bad for you because "OpenAI" will copy what you have written and give it to users as if "OpenAI" had created it. Why write a blog when nobody will read it?
