Free lunch has finished artificial intelligence that broke the web

The founding deal of the modern web network, a handshake agreement that has paid two contracts and content, is officially dead. Cloudflare put a price for the Internet, and it comes to have free lunch of artificial intelligence.

Nearly 30 years ago, the Tanford students, Larry Beige and Sergey Brain, built Google on a simple deal: the content of the content will allow them to copy the entire web for traffic. For years, these advertising revenues work on traffic, subscriptions, and online media. Google mostly supported the end of the deal. But this era collapses under the weight of artificial intelligence.

On July 1, Cloudflare, one of the basic internet infrastructure companies, announced “The Day of Content Independence”. In the transformation of historical policy, the company Declare Artificial intelligence crawls will now be prevented from bulldozing the sites hosting on its basic system unless these robot programs are pushing the content of the data they consume.

“Cloudflare, along with the majority of prominent publishers in the world and artificial intelligence companies, changes the default to prevent Ai Crawles unless the creators pay their content.” Blog post. “This content is the fuel that operates artificial intelligence engines, and therefore it is fair that the content creators will be compensated directly for it.”

This is a sharp and aggressive turn of the traditional open spirit of the web. Cloudflare argues that he has long been late. Artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT and Google Open Overviews directly answer the user’s questions, effectively on mining sites effectively to get information while sending almost any traffic to the original source.

“Instead of a fair trade, the web is stripped by Ai Crawles with content creators who see almost no traffic and therefore almost no value,” said Prince.

Publishers, see you! 🙌 Cloudflare launched salaries for every crawl to put control over your content.

Now, crawling is more transparent and monitoring, by default, creating a better online environmental system for creators like you. This is about real content … pic.twitter.com/yatb5LSBIM

– Cloudflare (Cloudflare) July 2, 2025

The web as a Swiss chest

The numbers are blatant. Cloudflare claims that it is already difficult to get Google’s traffic from Google from what it was a decade ago due to features like the answer box. But new artificial intelligence models are much worse. According to the interior standards of Cloudflare, Openai leads a traffic less than 750 times from the search for traditional Google, while Antarbur leads 30,000 times less. The reason is simple: people ask Chatgpt instead of Googling. The content is still used, but creators were completely cut off from the value chain.

Using its location as a gateway for about 20 % of all the world’s web sites (about five passes on the web that passes through the Cloudflare network), Cloudflare now forces the problem by charging losses.

But the plan goes further than just preventing robots. Cloudflare aims to create a new content market where AI and creators can circulate directly. Compensation does not depend on clicks, but on the value of the content to train artificial intelligence models. To explain this, the company uses a twisted metaphor: Imagine that knowing artificial intelligence is a mass of Swiss cheese. The holes represent the gaps of knowledge. The more your content is one of these holes, the more it deserves the artificial intelligence company.

It is an ambitious proposal that challenges the entire web economy, which still appreciates the rulers of something. Cloudflare is betting that filling gaps in knowing machines is a long -term market that is more stable than chasing a volatile human attention. It also alludes to something more extreme: the end of the free and open network as we know it.

This step represents the dawn of the payment era to training. Openaii has already signed high -level licensing deals with publishers such as Reddit and The Financial Times. Other artificial intelligence giants fill in the data partnerships quietly or scramble everything they can. But the Cloudflare decision is the first time that the main infrastructure provider has turned the default preparation for a large part of the Internet.

We took

The real story here is not only a technique; It is economical. We are seeing the rise of a new category of digital intermediaries, companies whose access between web content and artificial intelligence models are feeding on. In the Internet after clicking, the new currency training data is considered to be the Cloudflare itself as a main bank.

The company says its goal is to enter into a new golden age for creators. “We believe that if we can start recording and value of the content not on the amount of traffic it generates, but on the amount of knowledge that enhances knowledge, the prince said:” We will not only help AI engines to improve better, but also facilitate the new golden age to create high -value content. “

This looks nice. But it also raises messy questions. Who decides what is considered a high value? Who gets salaries and how much? If the content of Amnesty International is improved instead of people, what happens to the spirit of the web? The dark possibility is a cold war of content, as publishers stop everything and artificial intelligence companies bring exclusive data deals, making the web more fragmented and less open than ever.

Whether the “Swiss cheese” of Cloudflare is launched or not, this is true: AI broke the old web economy based on research. On July 1, Cloudflare drew a line in the sand. For the first time in the era of artificial intelligence, the Internet tubes are fighting again.