Cloudflare CEO Warns AI Undermines Creators' Revenue

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said on Feb. 21, 2026, that AI language models are disrupting the internet business model by scraping and answering content, reducing referrals to publishers and creators. Prince cited declining referral ratios — Google now sends one human per 30 pages, Microsoft 70-to-1, OpenAI 37,000-to-1 and Anthropic 500,000-to-1 — and urged new compensation models to reward creators beyond traffic.