How will the web fight back against the wave of generative AI that is ingesting all the content on the internet, but not paying for it?

We're joined today by Matthew Prince.

He's the CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare and has been on the warpath attempting to write the ship.

Matthew, great to see you. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Can you start by giving us a sense as to

what is happening to the web with the rise of genera? We've talked about it a bit on the show already,

but I want to hear it from you. Yeah, absolutely. So the business model, fundamentally, of the internet

over the last 30 years, has really been driven by search.

You search for something that generates traffic.

It takes you to content that someone has created.

And then that content owner, that content creator, can drive value really in one of three ways.

They can sell the content itself, sell a subscription to it.

We see plenty of that these days. They can put

ads up against it, or they can just get the ego hit of knowing that somebody cares about and is

reading their stuff. And that's really how the web has been built today. It's been built chasing that

traffic. What we're seeing, though, is that for the first time in history, searches across the major search engines, Google in particular, are actually on the decline. And what's replacing it is more and more people turning to AI. And the difference with AI is rather than giving you 10 blue links that you click to and find

the answer, now what AI does is it tries to give you the answer itself.

And that's meaning that people aren't going to those original sources.

And if they don't go to the original sources, then that means that you can't sell a subscription

anymore.

You can't put ads up against it.

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