Publishers facing existential threat from AI, Cloudflare CEO says
Publishers face an existential threat in the AI era and need to take action to make sure they are fairly compensated for their content, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Axios at an event in Cannes on Thursday.
Why it matters: Search traffic referrals have plummeted as people increasingly rely on AI summaries to answer their queries, forcing many publishers to reevaluate their business models.
Startling stat: Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent a publisher, per Prince.
He said that six months ago:
For Google that ratio was 6:1
For OpenAI, it was 250:1
For Anthropic, it was 6,000:1
Now:
For Google, it's 18:1
For OpenAI, it's 1,500:1
For Anthropic, it's 60,000:1
Between the lines:"People aren't following the footnotes," Prince said.
While search engines and AI chatbots include links to original sources, publishers can only derive advertising revenue if readers click through.
"People trust the AI more over the last six months, which means they're not reading original content," he said.
"The future of the web is going to be more and more like AI, and that means that people are going to be reading the summaries of your content, not the original content."
What to watch: Prince said Cloudflare is working on a new tool that will stop content scraping.
"That's the easy step, and that's coming very, very soon, and every publisher you have ever heard of is on board," he said.
Cloudflare, which provides a number of tech services including cybersecurity and content delivery networks, recently launched a tool that obstructs bots that ignore "no crawl" directives.
The bottom line: Prince is optimistic Cloudflare can pull this off.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Is TikTok getting banned? Trump says he'll 'probably' extend deadline again
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he will "probably" extend the TikTok ban deadline yet again before its expiration on Thursday, June 19. "We probably have to get China approval. I think we'll get it," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, June 17. "I think (Chinese) President Xi will ultimately approve it." TikTok, a short-form video app, went dark for about 12 hours in January when China-based ByteDance failed to divest the app's U.S. assets, as required by federal law. Since coming into office on Jan. 20, Trump has issued two executive orders to extend the ban's deadline. But so far, a deal has yet to be struck, and the next deadline is Thursday, June 19. When asked by reporters if he has the legal basis to extend the deadline again, Trump said, "Yes, I do." If ByteDance does not divest TikTok by Thursday, June 19, the platform could be banned in the U.S. again. However, Trump has repeatedly signaled he would extend the deadline if the sale isn't finalized in time. Under federal legislation that put the TikTok ban in place, the president can implement a 90-day extension on the deadline to sell. But Trump didn't take this route in January or April. Instead, he signed executive orders delaying the ban by 75 days. If Trump wishes to sign another executive order ahead of the June 19 deadline, he can. Former President Joe Biden signed federal legislation in 2024 that gave ByteDance until Jan. 19, 2025 to divest TikTok or face a ban in the U.S. Some politicians see TikTok as a national security threat, expressing concern that ByteDance may be sharing U.S. user data with the Chinese government. ByteDance has denied these claims, which remain unsubstantiated. However, ByteDance did not divest in time. In January, TikTok went dark for a little more than 12 hours in the U.S. after the app was effectively banned. U.S. internet hosting services made TikTok unavailable to access, and app stores removed the app for download. During the short-lived shutdown, Trump promised internet hosting services and app stores that they could restore TikTok and not face legal penalties. Under the federal legislation, companies could be fined $5,000 per user they help access TikTok. For companies like Google and Apple, this could mean a $5,000 fine for each user who downloads or updates TikTok. It wasn't until Feb. 13 that TikTok became available again in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. This story will be updated. Greta Cross is a national trending reporter at USA TODAY. Story idea? Email her at gcross@ This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: TikTok ban: Trump says he'll 'probably' extend deadline again
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Why Alphabet Stock Flopped on Friday
The company didn't have a good day in a top European court. The court's key advisor recommended that the tech titan's appeal against a large fine be rejected. 10 stocks we like better than Alphabet › Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG)(NASDAQ: GOOGL) stock didn't finish the trading week on a high note. The Google parent company's two listed shares both sank by nearly 4% in price that day, thanks in no small part to a development on the regulatory front. Those declines were notably more pronounced than the S&P 500 index's 0.2% slip on the day. Alphabet's key business unit Google is on the hook to pay a 4.1 billion euro ($4.7 billion) fine to the European Union (EU), after it ruled in 2018 that the company actively stifled search engine competition with its Android mobile operating system. The tech giant has, not surprisingly, appealed that fine. That appeal is now pending at the highest court in the EU, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). In what has to be considered a setback for Google/Alphabet, the CJEU's advocate-general -- the court's top advisory official -- recommended that Google's appeal be dismissed. In her recommendation, Juliane Kokott said that "Google held a dominant position in several markets of the Android-ecosystem and thus benefited from network effects that enabled it to ensure that users used Google Search." Although Kokott's recommendations are non-binding, CJEU justices typically accept and follow the advice of the court's advocate-general. Alphabet has not yet publicly commented on this latest development in its appeal. Alphabet did get something of a break with the fine, as it was cut slightly from the original amount of over 4.3 billion euros ($4.9 billion) to the 4.1 billion euros currently hanging over it. The company, sprawling and powerful as it is, can easily afford the fine in the likely case its appeal fails. However, a defeat would illustrate Alphabet's continued vulnerability to anti-competitive lawsuits like the EU's. Before you buy stock in Alphabet, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Alphabet wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $659,171!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $891,722!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 995% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025 Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Eric Volkman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Why Alphabet Stock Flopped on Friday was originally published by The Motley Fool Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Is OpenAI's Deal With Alphabet a Game Changer?
For the last couple of years, OpenAI has relied heavily on Microsoft to supply compute power through the Azure cloud platform. Recently, OpenAI has been exploring new cloud partnerships with Oracle and now Google in an effort to migrate away from Microsoft. Teaming up with OpenAI could be a transformative move for Alphabet as its core search business continues to face pressure. 10 stocks we like better than Alphabet › For more than two years now, ChatGPT developer OpenAI has been at the center of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. The company has raised billions in funding from Microsoft, works closely with leading AI-focused cloud providers such as CoreWeave, and is among the key players pushing a $500 billion domestic AI infrastructure initiative called Project Stargate. Recently, OpenAI found itself in the headlines yet again following news of a major partnership with Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL). Let's explore how OpenAI and Alphabet are teaming up, and assess why this deal could be a game changer. Microsoft's investment in OpenAI wasn't just about raising capital. As part of their partnership, OpenAI became tightly integrated into Microsoft's cloud service, Azure. While Azure's infrastructure has been key to OpenAI maintaining explosive growth over the last two years, recent moves from the ChatGPT maker suggest it's looking to avoid vendor lock-in with Microsoft. For instance, as part of Project Stargate, Oracle is reportedly exploring purchasing several billion dollars worth of Nvidia's newest Blackwell GPU architecture and leasing access to these chips to OpenAI. According to recent reporting, OpenAI's partnership with Alphabet revolves around the same use case as the Oracle deal: accessing compute power through the Google Cloud Platform. As data workloads continue to rise, training and inferencing AI models becomes increasingly sophisticated and costly. Hence, broadening its cloud compute infrastructure beyond Azure is critical for OpenAI. While cloud computing has emerged as a fast-growing business for Alphabet, Google Cloud operates at a much smaller scale than Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS). That said, working with OpenAI may look odd from the outside as the platform could be seen as both a technical competitor and existential threat to Google's search business and AI efforts. However, I think there is a more interesting aspect to this relationship whereby Alphabet is hedging the economic profiles of its various platforms. Since ChatGPT emerged, skeptics have been sounding the alarm on Alphabet's internet search business (Google). The bear narrative is that inputting a query into a chatbot such as ChatGPT and receiving a detailed response instantly will turn people away from the traditional search process of Googling something. Although Alphabet continues to own significant surface area on the internet thanks to properties such as Google and YouTube, some search trends are beginning to indicate that ChatGPT and other large language models may be encroaching on Google's dominance. In turn, Alphabet's search advertising empire may be about to crack. While the exact details about OpenAI and Google Cloud's relationship are under tight wraps, I have some ideas as to why this deal could actually make a lot of strategic sense for Alphabet. In a scenario where OpenAI and its peers begin to erode Google search -- thereby taking a toll on Alphabet's advertising revenue -- Alphabet is still able to capture some downstream monetization. What I mean by that is Alphabet's cloud infrastructure business captures revenue that is otherwise lost from the consumer-facing advertising segment of Google search. In turn, this new stream of cloud revenue can help tighten the gap with AWS and Azure. In addition, a far more lucrative opportunity for Alphabet could be to hone Google's own AI capabilities by gaining visibility into OpenAI's workloads. Granted, this last point may be wishful thinking for the time being, as it's not entirely known what Alphabet will be privy to with regards to accessing OpenAI's data flow. In the chart below, investors can see that Alphabet trades at a considerable discount compared to its cloud hyperscaler peers on a forward earnings basis. The valuation disparity between Alphabet and its cohorts could suggest an overly bearish narrative, rooted in two primary areas. First, some investors may be of the opinion that Alphabet entered the cloud computing race far too late and will never catch up to Amazon or Microsoft. Second, the rise of OpenAI has been labeled an existential threat to Google for years now -- and I think Alphabet's steep discount relative to its peers is pricing in such a narrative. As I outlined above, though, the irony from Alphabet's deal with OpenAI is that the company might actually have unlocked a backdoor channel to continue thriving even as its core search business faces mounting pressure. To me, the deal with OpenAI is a transformative game changer for Alphabet in the long run and I see the stock as a no-brainer buy right now. Before you buy stock in Alphabet, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Alphabet wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $664,089!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $881,731!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 994% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025 Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Adam Spatacco has positions in Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Is OpenAI's Deal With Alphabet a Game Changer? was originally published by The Motley Fool
