Don’t Just Feed the Machine
It used to be a fair trade.
Publishers gave Google their content. Google gave them traffic.
That was the deal.
Clicks, CPMs, cookies. The business model of the internet.
But now, AI doesn’t send traffic.
It doesn’t click. It doesn’t convert.
It just consumes.
Cloudflare sees it. Sitting in front of 20 percent of the internet, they’ve watched as AI scrapers—from the big names to the sketchy proxies—crawl sites and copy content. Not maliciously. Just freely. And that’s the problem.
The interface has changed. People don’t go to you anymore.
They go to the answer.
They go to the summary.
They go to the derivative.
"We’re not just marketing on the internet anymore. We’re helping train the thing that replaces our marketing."
And in that shift, entire ecosystems are getting buried.
As Cloudflare’s CEO put it on a recent interview, it’s ten times harder to get traffic than it was a decade ago.
At first, it feels like a publisher problem. But it's not.
Brands are publishers now.
Content studios. Explainers. Opinion pieces. Thought leadership.
We’re all feeding the machine.
Except we’re not getting anything back.
That campaign you crafted? Might be rewritten into an AI-generated ad brief tomorrow.
Your research? Swallowed, summarized, and rephrased without a single click to your site.
