During a Web Summit appearance in Lisbon on Wednesday, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince stated that Google was exploiting its search market dominance to gather web content for its AI models, without compensating the sites from which it was taking information.
During a discussion with Coins2Day on the MEO arena’s central platform, he implored leaders at Google's parent company, Alphabet, to compensate website publishers for the material required to train their extensive language models.
Regarding Prince's assertions, Google informed Coins2Day that it perceives its referral traffic as consistent compared to the previous year, and its priority is delivering superior clicks, such as those from users who don't promptly return to a publisher's site after arriving. Google states that websites can choose to disallow AI crawling without negatively impacting their referrals or ad placements.
Cloudflare offers web backend services, including content delivery networks, cybersecurity, and mitigation of denial-of-service attacks. “Eighty percent of the leading AI companies are CloudFlare customers,” Prince pointed out in his comments.
He then turned to Google, which has a 90% share of the search market.
“The great patron of the internet for the last 27 years was Google. The great villain of the internet today is also Google,” Prince said. He claimed that in the past, for every two pages that Google crawled to inform its search engine, it would, on average, send one visitor to those sites—traffic that publishers can monetise with advertising.
But today, he claims, Google only sends one visitor per 20 pages scanned. “What’s changed is they put an AI overview at the top [of search results], and you don’t have to actually click on anything in order to get your answer. You’re not going to that content.”
“And that’s the good news,” he continued. “The bad news is that if you look at companies like OpenAI, who have provided amazing tools, they are 1,500 scrapes for one visit. Anthropic is 40,000 scrapes for one visitor. And the problem is if these new AI tools aren’t generating traffic, then the fundamental business model of the internet is going to break down. Certainly for media content creators, but even for some things like small businesses and brands, as well.”
Prince stated that Google executives have informed him they believe they ought to compensate for content, which is a fair assessment of Google's position. Similarly, all prominent AI firms have expressed this sentiment. “They are all saying we have to pay for this content. We have to be giving something back to the ecosystem.”
“We talk all the time [with Google] and, they say, ‘we get it.’ There are a lot of people at Google that understand that. They believe in the internet. They believe in the ecosystem. They believe in supporting it, but they also are stuck with the old business model, while being competed with by a new business model” driven by the big AI platforms.
He stated that since Google refuses to pay, other companies are also hesitant to offer compensation. “I worry that it’s really tough to tell OpenAI or Anthropic that they have to pay for something, but Google gets it for free. That’s not fair.”
Prince contended that the situation is worsened by the reality that if a website publisher wishes to inform Google that they don't want their material used to train Gemini, Google's AI, that site could face a lower ranking in Google's search results, as the identical directive serves both purposes.
“It’s not just that you drop out of search, but because Google runs so much of the ad monetization infrastructure, if you shut their [AI] bots down your ads stop working in some cases. That’s insane, right?” Prince said.
There is a debate in the SEO industry as to whether this is true. Google offers a command that sites can use called “Google Extended” that blocks AI crawlers and “does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search” or affect a site’s search ranking, according to the company. However, some believe that the less Google knows about a site the less likely it is to use that site as a reference, in part because it will prevent that site from being used as a resource by Gemini.
When questioned about whether he believed this constituted an abuse of monopoly, Prince responded, “Totally, absolutely. And the reason we’re not talking about it is because nobody sees behind the curtain what’s going on here.”
“Google is using a dominant position that they have in search to leverage their way into AI.”