"After all, ever since the 15th century, when gainfully employed scribes warned that the printing press would mean the extinction of high-quality literature, writers and their bosses have fretted over technological developments spelling the end of their trade. 'I remember - distinctly - rolling my eyes and thinking, 'God, media companies. They're such Luddites. They're always complaining about the next technology,' recalls Prince, the co-founder of Cloudflare, a data juggernaut that acts the equivalent of a nightclub bouncer for the internet."
""It was really stark," he says. "10 years ago,for every two pages that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. But over the last decade Google has transitioned from being less of a search engine and more of an answer generator. And what we found was that now, for every 19 pages that Google scrapes, they send you one visitor. So it has become almost 10 times harder to get traffic if you're generating content today.""
Major publishers warned in 2022 that artificial intelligence posed an existential threat to news and content businesses. Matthew Prince, co-founder of Cloudflare, initially doubted those warnings. Publishers feared widespread scraping of intellectual property by AI firms and collapse of referral traffic. Cloudflare's data showed a dramatic decline in search referrals: ten years ago roughly two pages scraped produced one visitor; now about nineteen pages scraped produce one visitor. Google has shifted from a search engine into an answer generator, reducing publisher traffic by nearly tenfold. The traditional search-publisher traffic exchange now faces an existential challenge, prompting efforts to preserve the web's economic model.
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