Google, AI and content rankings: Cloudflare CEO points out internet's biggest problem

In this highly digitised world, mostly courtesy of the internet, the competition among countless content producers has long been affected by the repercussions of AI, which takes the organic traffic meant for web pages onto the summaries produced by AI offerings like Google's AI Summaries.

This predicament has intensified the race among web pages churning out all the information on a myriad of topics on the internet, an overwhelming amount of data on which generative AI tools rely.

While this problem with the internet's infrastructure and its data seems to remain for longer than one might expect, Matthew Prince, the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, the world's largest internet infrastructure company, has revealed the core of this internet woe, which he believes is keeping content creators from preventing their genuine content from falling prey to AI.

At a recent event with an international news outlet in San Francisco, Prince shared that his company has blocked over 400 billion requests from AI bots trying to access content for its customers since July 1.

Cloudflare CEO points out the internet's biggest problem

He says that the biggest problem of the internet is Google, which has committed to something inevitable for creators: "Google has combined their search crawler with their AI crawler."

This means that if a site blocks Google’s AI scraper, it also loses its visibility in Google search results.

This places content creators in a tough spot, as they want to protect their work from being used by AI models, but they also need to be visible in Google searches to reach their audience. 

“You can't opt out of one without opting out of both, which is a real challenge. Which is a real challenge,” Prince noted.

How much internet can Google see?

Regarding Google's accessibility to the extensive volume of information and data that exists online all over the world, Prince claimed that "Google sees 3.2 times more pages on the internet than OpenAI does. They see 4.6 times more than Microsoft does. They see 4.8 times more than Meta and Anthropic do."

Since July 2024, Cloudflare has provided tools for customers to stop these AI bots from scraping their content.

Cloudflare announced a "Content Independence Day" initiative in July, aimed at blocking AI crawlers from accessing creators' work unless the AI companies pay for it.

The company reported that 416 billion AI bot requests have been blocked since July 1, 2025.

The internet geek was of the view that it shouldn't be acceptable for a company to use its past dominance to control the future market.