CEO of Claudflare Matthew Prince has warned that AI and zero-click search results can destroy how to work on the Internet for the last 15 years-and have earned money. In a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, Prince said that the rise of AI and how people search online, is making it difficult to get traffic for websites, which means that material manufacturers are earning less. He said, “The business model of AI web is going to change fundamentally. The web business model has been discovered for the last 15 years. In a way or any other, the search drives everything that goes online,” he said.

Prince told how this innings started with Google. A decade ago, Google search results used to carry people to other websites. “If you look back 10 years ago, if you have made a discovery on Google you have got the list of 10 blue links back,” he said. Next, for each two pages scraped from a website by Google, it sent a visitor to that site. “Curry two pages, get a visitor. And that was business.” But today, this is a different story. Google still scraps at the same rate, but now it takes six scraped pages to get just a visitor.

According to Prince, most users now get their answers on Google’s search result page. He said, “Today, 75 percent of questions have been answered in Google, which you have been answered without leaving Google, replied to that page,” he said. This means that users no longer need to visit the original website. It has given a tough competition to the material creators. “If they were getting value through selling membership or inserting an advertisement, or just ego to know that someone was reading your belongings, he has gone,” Prince said.

He also said how AI equipment makes things worse. The ratio is now more inappropriate. “So it was 2: 1 10 years ago for Google. It’s 6: 1 today. What do you think it’s for Openai? 250: 1. What do you think it’s for anthropic? 6,000: 1,” He said. This means that AI companies are using thousands of pages to create answers, but they do not send users back to websites that made that information in the first place.

Prince believes this model is broken. “The web business model cannot survive until there is some changes,” he said, warning that if the manufacturers cannot earn money, they will stop making materials.

Cloudflare is in a unique position, he said, because it provides strength to both AI companies and websites. “80 percent of AI companies use cloudflaare, similarly, you know, 20 to 30 percent of web uses web cloudflair. And so we sit in the middle of it.”

Nevertheless, he says, not all hope is lost. “AI is a craze, is it an overheet? I think the answer is probably yes and no. I think 99 percent of the money that people are spending on these projects today is just burning on fire. But 1 percent is going to be incredibly valuable”, he said.