Cloudflare wants to charge AI scrapers before they kill the web

Non-human traffic now drives over half the web, and Cloudflare wants to force AI bots to pay for the content they take.

In an interview with The Verge, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince detailed a plan to rescue publishers from relentless AI crawlers. Cloudflare found that bots made up more than half of all internet traffic in June. To save site owners, Cloudflare is giving publishers tools to block AI crawlers, allow them, or charge them for access.

Why it matters: For 30 years, Google-driven advertising funded the web. AI scrapers break that trade-off by taking data without sending back human visitors who click ads. If publishers cannot charge AI companies for content, the creators funding the web will go broke.

Know this: Cloudflare sits in front of millions of websites. Site owners can already toggle Cloudflare controls to block AI scrapers outright or opt into new payout schemes as pay-for-access deals take shape.

If the future web is just bots reading text for other bots, someone still has to pay the humans who wrote it.