Cloudflare's CEO, Matthew Prince, is advocating for regulatory intervention in Google's AI practices, specifically urging UK regulators to consider unbundling Google's search and AI crawlers. Prince contends that Google's dominance in search provides it with an unfair advantage in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. He suggests that separating Google's AI Overview segment from its traditional search operations could foster a more competitive environment, leading to greater innovation and consumer choice.
Prince has been vocal about the impact of AI-driven search summaries on content creators, arguing that they reduce traffic to original websites and undermine the traditional internet business model. He has also criticised licensing deals between publishers and AI companies, arguing that they lack technical restrictions and devalue digital content. Cloudflare is developing tools to combat AI scrapers and is exploring methods to ensure AI firms compensate content creators for using their material.
Prince believes that action is needed to address the imbalance between AI companies and content creators. He has pointed out that while Google crawls websites, the ratio of visitors back to the original site has dropped significantly, especially compared to AI crawlers like OpenAI and Anthropic. Cloudflare is also developing solutions to allow website owners to block AI crawlers without affecting standard search indexing.
