AI’s Appetite: How Bots Are Starving Web Publishers
Generative AI’s rise is starving content creators of website traffic. Chatbots are increasingly answering user queries directly, depriving sites of crucial clicks and advertising revenue. Cloudflare’s CEO is sounding the alarm, calling this trend an “existential threat” for publishers across the web.
Traffic’s Tumble
Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, has revealed alarming data about AI’s impact on website traffic. Users are bypassing links to find answers. This change is significantly impacting the business models of many websites, which rely on ad revenue from visits.
The traffic decline from AI to the web is even worse than we thought. https://t.co/m0mX9WkS9g
— Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) June 19, 2025
“I fight every day against the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably the Americans, the Israelites, all trying to invade our customers’ websites,””
—Matthew Prince, CEO, Cloudflare
A recent study shows that the average time a user spends on a website has dropped by 15% since AI chatbots became popular (Study Source).
The Numbers Don’t Lie
The decline in referral traffic is evident across major platforms. Google is now sending a visitor to a website for every eighteen pages viewed, a sharp drop from just a few years ago. Similarly, OpenAI requires 1,500 pages analyzed to generate a single visit.
Anthropic’s decline is even more dramatic: the platform now needs 60,000 pages viewed to generate a visit.
Cloudflare’s Counter-Attack
Cloudflare is not standing idly by. The company is actively developing tools to combat bots that scrape content to train large language models, even when ignoring website directives. They launched the “AI Labyrinth,” which guides bots through a maze of fabricated content.
This strategic move traps bots, wasting their resources on useless data. Cloudflare views this as a fight against digital threats.
