Cloudflare’s latest Founders’ Letter marks the company’s 15th birthday with a distinct shift in perspective: after helping the web go from 10% encrypted traffic to 95% in just fifteen years, they now tackle a bigger existential challenge—how content creators will survive in an AI-first Internet.
For the last decade and a half, we’ve lived with a simple model: content is king, and traffic is the throne. Build something compelling, get discovered (mostly via search engines), then monetize through ads, subscriptions, ecommerce, or just the pride of having attention on your work. Web ads—a necessary evil—have been the only micropayment system that actually worked at scale. It’s why Cloudflare never built ad blockers, despite pressure: this imperfect system keeps the web vibrant and open.
But traffic, as a proxy for value, is far from perfect. Clickbait, ragebait, and dopamine-driven headlines have warped the way content is created. Media companies, consultancies, and online creators all chase eyeballs instead of impactful knowledge.
AI Changes Everything: Search Engines to Answer Engines
There’s a tectonic shift happening right now. The old “treasure map” of search (you ask, get links, go hunt) is being replaced—fast—by AI agents and answer engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s new “AI Overview.” Most users just want answers, not a list of clickable links. The implications are huge: if your agent summarizes the world’s news for you, why click through to each site? Why see any ads? Why pay for subscriptions if the agent piggybacks off someone else’s?
What Cloudflare’s founders describe is a crisis for anyone still clinging to traffic-based monetization. Answer engines divert users away from human-powered clicks, threatening the viability of journalism, research, and the entire content ecosystem. If nothing changes, even the most robust publishers could see their business models collapse.
What Could Replace Traffic? Rewarding Human Knowledge, Not Just Pageviews
Cloudflare is optimistic, though—because AI companies need quality content to survive. They’re starting to license and reward creators whose work brings genuine value—think quirky, original forums like Reddit, instead of generic news or clickbait. The new business model could be based on the “holes in the cheese” metaphor: AI models (the cheese) inevitably miss knowledge, and the creators who fill those gaps get rewarded.
Imagine: instead of traffic, the model pays out to writers, researchers, and creators who fill knowledge gaps in the AI collective. Subscription fees and AI-driven ad dollars could end up pooled and distributed to those truly enriching human knowledge, ranked by their contributions to unique and local topics.
A Level Playing Field—and Cloudflare’s Role
Cloudflare argues for a collaborative, open, standardized approach: not about preserving search engine dominance or legacy content farms, but about catalyzing sustainable and equitable compensation for content creators in the AI era. Their new tools let even small publishers control how and when AI agents access their work, and help broker fair deals.
In short: the Internet is shifting from a traffic-based economy to one that potentially rewards the actual value you bring to human knowledge—if the market tips the right way. Cloudflare wants to help tip it, so creators big and small, plus new AI entrants, all get a fair slice.
What’s Next?
If major AI players start pooling revenues to reward the best content, and the algorithms themselves map the gaps in their knowledge, we really could see a renaissance of creative, unique, local, and impactful information online. But it’ll take strong incentives, standards, and industry collaboration to avoid a future where nobody creates and everyone just consumes.
Cloudflare’s bottom line: celebrate the encrypted web of yesterday but get ready for a new Internet model that values knowledge over mere clicks.
Read the original article here: Cloudflare’s 2025 Annual Founders’ Letter
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