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In brief: AI and zero-click searches are killing the business model of the web that has sustained content creators for the last 15 years. It's an opinion that is shared by many, including the CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, who recently warned that "search drives everything that happens online."
It's been known for some time that the web is changing into the Zero-Click Internet, the name for when users no longer need to click on links to find whatever content they want.
Social media sites stopped promoting posts with links years ago, posting content directly on the platforms so users don't have to leave them. With the advent of generative AI, people are having their queries answered directly on Google's search page – no need to click on a website to find an answer.
Related reading: The Zero Click Internet
Prince, boss of the CDN/security giant Cloudflare, spoke about the impact of a Zero Click Internet during a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations.
"AI is going to fundamentally change the business model of the web. The business model of the web for the last 15 years has been search. Search drives everything that happens online," he said.
Prince also talked about how the value exchange between Google and those who create web content is disappearing. He noted that almost a decade ago, every two pages that Google scraped meant it would send websites a visitor. Today, it takes six scraped pages to get one visitor, despite the crawl rate not changing.
"Today, 75 percent of the queries get answered without you leaving Google," the CEO revealed.
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The rise of large language models and the AI companies behind them has sent the crisis into overdrive, pushing the scraping-to-visitor ratio far above Google's six to one. As such, creators see lower returns – and with so much AI scraping of content without permission, they often get nothing at all for their work.
"And so the business model of the web can't survive unless there's some change, because more and more the answers to the questions that you ask won't lead you to the original source, it will be some derivative of that source."
While some will argue that being able to find an answer quickly and from multiple sources without clicking through several sites is easier and more convenient, there are obvious problems.
The main issue is that nobody is going to want to create new content when they get paid nothing or almost nothing for doing so. This is especially true when it comes to smaller, independent, impartial sites that AI companies might not partner with. And let's not forget how often AI gets things completely wrong.
"Sam Altman at OpenAI and others get that. But he can't be the only one paying for content when everyone else gets it for free."
Prince said that 80 percent of AI companies use Cloudflare, and 20 to 30 percent of the web uses its services. He added that as his company is at the center of the problem, it is thinking about ways to address the situation, hopefully before it is too late.
The executive also talked about the billions of dollars being invested in generative AI and the lack of returns.
"In terms of, is AI a fad, is it overhyped? I think the answer is probably yes and no. I would guess that 99 percent of the money that people are spending on these projects today is just getting lit on fire. But 1 percent is going to be incredibly valuable. And I can't tell you what 1 percent of that is. And so maybe we've all got a light, you know, $100 on fire to find that one dollar that matters."
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