Why AI Bots Should Pay to Read the Web
Bots passed human traffic online in May, and Cloudflare's Matthew Prince expects 1,000x as much automated traffic within five years. His fix is a payment of a fraction of a penny per page.
· 6 min read
Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, interviewed by Nilay Patel (Decoder with Nilay Patel)
Matthew Prince is co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, which runs a network in more than 350 cities and sits in front of over 20% of the web. Cloudflare protects websites and employees from attacks, and its developer platform is its fastest-growing business. In May the company laid off about 1,100 people, 20% of staff, and Prince explained why in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Cloudflare now has between 4,500 and 5,000 employees. Prince also owns a small local newspaper in Park City, Utah, with his wife.
Summary
Prince says automated traffic passed human traffic online in May and could reach 1,000 times human traffic within five years. Advertising cannot pay for bots, so Cloudflare is pushing a payment of a fraction of a penny per access, with leading AI companies willing to pay and publishers eager to be paid. He argues that unique content, such as local news and Reddit, is what AI labs want, and that blocking by technology works better than lawsuits. Internally, Cloudflare cut 20% of staff in the measuring functions, kept hiring builders and sellers, and flattened management. He says leaders should take the hit early and help people land elsewhere. These signals are from an interview that Nilay Patel did with Matthew Prince on Decoder with Nilay Patel.
- Bots Passed Humans. Last November, at Web Summit, Prince predicted that automated traffic would pass human traffic in the second half of 2027. Cloudflare's data moved the date to the first half of 2027 by March, and in May his team told him it had already happened. He extrapolates to automated traffic of 1,000 times human traffic in five years, with the caveat that his earlier predictions have been wrong. Human traffic stays roughly flat, and the web is growing again: it declined from about 2012 until October 2025, then vibe-coding tools made websites easy to build, and growth is now the fastest since the early 2000s. ▶ 4:46
