Cloudflare CEO Slams Google After Thwarting 416 Billion AI Bots In 5 Months

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince recently spoke out against Google's AI practices, highlighting that while his company has successfully blocked 416 billion unwanted AI scrapers from its customers' content, Google has made opting out of the practice extremely difficult for most companies doing business on the web. Prince spoke strongly in an interview with Wired, stating "We need to be able to make sure that businesses large and small flourish on a fair playing ground. This is the future we're trying to play for. That's the best thing for our business, because that's more people to be customers of ours. That's more internet for us to be able to protect."

Cloudflare is one of the key pillars holding up the modern Internet. Cloudflare offers an array of services, but one of its greatest strengths is blocking cyberattacks and spam from assailing customers' servers. Barring extreme circumstances where Cloudflare has stumbled, the company is one of the most reliable digital service providers there is. While successful attacks on it can and do have widespread consequences, those successful attacks are rare, unusual events.

But Matthew Prince's statements aren't addressed to cybercriminals—rather, they're directed straight at Google itself. Google and its search engine are responsible for directing an overwhelming majority of web traffic, and for decades that has led to countless sites built around Google-centric Search Engine Optimizations. This isn't necessarily a bad thing—many SEO best practices improve user experiences—but it does mean that if you want a fair chance to compete on the modern Internet, you have to abide by Google's playbook and allow your site to be crawled by its search engine.


But since Google began integrating AI services, it has made it impossible to opt into its search engine indexing without also allowing AI crawling and training. As Prince points out to Wired, "You can't opt out of one without opting out of both, which is a real challenge—it's crazy. It shouldn't be that you can use your monopoly position of yesterday in order to leverage and have a monopoly position in the market of tomorrow."

Prince also points out in the interview that publishers and content creators have had positive results from blocking AI crawlers. By not allowing AI crawlers to effectively steal their work, often without any form of credit or compensation, smaller services and creators can better compete on-line. "It's almost like a Marvel movie," Prince states, "The hero of the last film becomes of the villain of the next one. Google is the problem here. It is the company that is keeping us from going forward on the Internet, and until we force them—or hopefully convince them—that they should play by the same rules as everyone else and split their crawlers up between search and AI, I think we're going to have a hard time completely locking all the content down."

Image Credit: Cloudflare, Noam Galai for TechCrunch (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License)