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Can Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince Save the Web From AI?

September 26, 2026
AI News
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Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told Nilay Patel’s Decoder podcast that automated traffic passed human traffic in May and could reach 1,000 times human traffic within five years. We test his plan to save the web from AI, from default crawler blocks and the 15 September Disallow AI Training switch to HTTP 402 micropayments and a Spotify-style payout, against Cloudflare’s own posts, its earnings and the coverage since, and correct the figures he got wrong.

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AI Is Eating Website Traffic, Websites Are Blocking AI: Reliable Information Is Getting Harder to Find

August 31, 2026
Artificial Intelligence
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On 31 August 2026 Dana McKay and Damiano Spina of RMIT University argued in The Conversation that the web’s thirty-year deal between crawlers and websites has collapsed: AI crawlers take content to train models and write answers while sending almost no traffic back, reputable publishers respond by blocking them, and AI answers increasingly draw on the low-quality and AI-generated sites that do not block. This piece sets out their argument, the Pew, Wikipedia and Cloudflare data behind it, the three peer-reviewed studies that show the quality trap is real, Cloudflare’s 15 September default block, pay-per-use and licensing, and what readers and UK businesses should do now.