Cloudflare's CEO says AI agents browsing the web can run up costs for site owners who get nothing back, and tools now exist to block or charge them.
AI shopping and search helpers may be costing small website owners real money. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said on the company's third quarter earnings call that some of its customers see AI agents as "a bane to their business" and want to keep them away.
Prince asked listeners to imagine using an AI agent to pick a place to eat tonight. The agent might visit 1,000 restaurant websites and pull down 1,000 menus. Then he would choose just one. In his words, 999 of those restaurants now carry a cost but get no benefit.
Prince admitted that web searches have always sent some low-value traffic. His point is that the scale has changed. Cloudflare has predicted that bot traffic will be 1,000 times greater than clicks from humans. That is a forecast from the company, not a measured figure.
Cloudflare is a company that helps run and protect websites, so it has a stake in this. It offers tools that block AI agents, reduce their cost and traffic impact, or let site owners make money from AI traffic. Prince said about 5 percent of the web has opted in to its content protection products since July 1. He said Meta is already a customer.
He also argued that the container approach used by big cloud companies cannot keep up cost-effectively with agent traffic. Containers are a common way of packaging software to run in the cloud. Cloudflare pitches its own Workers service as the alternative.
Prince said nation-state hackers and criminals likely used the PHP2SHELL flaw for years before it was disclosed. He said Cloudflare is checking its logs for evidence. He also warned that the worst of the recent wave of security flaws may not be over.
Cloudflare reported record quarterly revenue of $782.5 million, up 39 percent from a year ago. After hours, its shares rose about 15 percent.
If you run a website, check how much of your traffic is AI bots and ask your provider about options to block or charge them.
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