In a podcast interview, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince stated that automated bot and AI traffic has surpassed human traffic, a milestone reached years ahead of schedule. He predicts bot traffic could be 1,000 times greater than human traffic within five years, rendering the current ad-based web business model obsolete since bots do not click on ads.
To address this, Prince discussed plans to revive the long-dormant HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code, creating a system where AI companies would pay publishers micropayments for crawling and using their content. As part of this strategy, Cloudflare has already changed its default settings to block Google's AI crawlers for customers who wish to do so, aiming to pressure large AI firms to differentiate between web indexing for search and data scraping for AI training.