Bots now outnumber human traffic on the web. Cloudflare’s CEO wants AI companies to pay for it

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Good morning. Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince expected web traffic from automated bots and AI agents to surpass human traffic at the end of next year. Instead, it happened in May, with Cloudflare reporting almost 60% of requests to websites coming from bots. At that rate, he says, there could be 1,000 times as much automated traffic as human traffic in five years. Many are AI crawlers ingesting content to train models that may never send a reader (or a cent) back to the site. Prince wants to change that. “Companies need to get paid by the AI companies for what is the fuel that runs these AI systems,” he told me from his office in downtown New York at One World Trade. These are, after all, his customers.

To that end Cloudflare—which manages traffic for more than a fifth of the web and counts 80% of the top AI companies as customers—this week announced a new “Disallow AI Training” setting that lets a website stay indexed for search on a crawler while blocking it from training on content. Apple, Google and Microsoft have agreed to the deal.

The announcement is one of the first real mechanisms publishers have to separate “index me” visitors from “train on me” crawlers, and it comes as Sony and Warner Music, news outlets and even major dictionary publishers pursue copyright suits against AI companies over intellectual property claims. 

Prince points out that AI is changing digital media in other ways, too. “The media world in the last 30 years really rewarded popularity and I think that the media world of the next 30 years might really reward credibility,” he said. “I’ve been really focused on: How do we make sure people get paid? But I worry that I don’t think we’ve thought enough about: How do we make sure that people get recognized?”

Indeed, writers, filmmakers, musicians and other content creators often value fame over fortune and reputation over rewards, making anonymity or intellectual theft especially painful. Prince believes there should be an Academy Award or Nobel Prize of knowledge to help give credit where it’s due.

Ultimately, attribution and compensation are critical for building sustainable media models that reward labor, creativity and the cost of producing the work. That’s true whether you’re creating something artistic, scientific or journalistic. Bots can spit out millions of articles that riff off the news. Someone has to report what’s really going on. “The world that I’m playing for is not one where there’s five AI companies. It’s where there’s 500,000,” Prince said. “If we don’t have a way of paying content creators, of funding the infrastructure buildout, of making everything more efficient, I just don’t know what the internet looks like in the future.”

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com