Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says AI is reshaping the web’s business model

Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince told *The Verge* that AI-driven bot traffic now makes up more than half of all internet traffic, a figure the company measured in June. Prince attributed the surge to AI companies scraping the web and AI agents performing tasks on behalf of users, a trend he said is forcing a rethink of the web’s long-standing advertising-driven business model.

Prince described Cloudflare’s mission as not only protecting websites from malicious actors but also helping to "rebuild the internet the way it should have been built from the beginning," with a growing focus on shaping the future "business model of the internet" amid AI disruption. He framed this as a shift from Cloudflare’s traditional role of speed and security toward a more active role in defining how content and services are funded and accessed online.

The interview highlighted Cloudflare’s internal reckoning with AI’s impact on its own operations. Prince noted that the company laid off more than 1,000 employees—about 20% of its workforce—earlier in the year. He later published an op-ed in *The Wall Street Journal* titled “How I choose which Cloudflare employees to replace with AI,” which he acknowledged was intended to provoke discussion about the company’s organizational and strategic adjustments in response to AI.

Prince argued that the dominance of advertising as the web’s primary business model, a paradigm pioneered by Google over the past three decades, is now under strain. He suggested that website owners are exploring new ways to exert control over AI-driven access to their content, including blocking scrapers, allowing select AI tools, or potentially charging for access as a means of sustaining revenue in an era where ad-driven monetization is less reliable.