Are the Internet’s fundamental economics breaking down as artificial intelligence transforms how people consume information? In her DLD Future Hub conversation with Marc Al-Hames (Hubert Burda Media), Cloudflare top executive Stephanie Cohen warns that people increasingly turn to AI models for direct answers instead visiting publishers’ websites.
“We’re seeing less and less clicks back to the original source”, Cohen says. This shift threatens the entire content ecosystem that has sustained the online world for decades. “The Internet is not free. It’s been subsidized by things like advertising”, Cohen explains. “And in a world where no one is going back to the original source, you can’t run your business based on advertising, subscriptions, or the content that you wrote.”
Cloudflare, a leading Internet infrastructure provider, aims to give content creators more control through innovative tools that allow them to determine what AI bots can do. One of them, called “pay per crawl”, lets publishers charge AI companies for access rather than simply blocking or allowing them.
“What we’re really trying to do is create the conditions for a market to develop”, Cohen explains. “There’s no market without scarcity”, she adds. And the way to create scarcity “is to have control and to have tools that work.”
Watch the video to learn more about Cloudflare’s efforts to create a new, more sustainable ecosystem for content creators in the age of chatbots and AI.
