The business model of content creation as we know it is dying.
Publishers and creators are watching their search traffic (and revenue) evaporate at unprecedented rates. Where Google once sent one visitor for every two pages it scraped from publishers a decade back, that ratio has plummeted to 18:1.
For AI companies, it's exponentially worse: OpenAI delivers one visitor for every 1,500 pages consumed; Anthropic, one for every 60,000.
The perverse irony is that better your content, the more valuable it is for training AI and the less likely anyone will ever visit your site. Quality content creators subsidize their own obsolescence.
The death spiral accelerates daily. As users increasingly trust AI-generated summaries, they stop clicking through to original sources. The traditional trinity of online monetization - advertising, subscriptions, and audience building - crumbles when your content becomes invisible fuel for someone else's answer engine.
This creates a brutal catch-22. Every marketer knows you must meet customers where they are. But those customers today aren't on your website. They're in ChatGPT's interface, asking questions your content could answer.
Block AI scrapers and risk total invisibility. Allow them, and watch your traffic evaporate. We need presence in AI systems to maintain relevance, but that presence currently destroys our economics.
Individual actions won’t save us. Just like musicians united against piracy, the publishing world must act collectively to restrict AI bots and create scarcity for their content, and ensure they are fairly compensated for original content.
All brand marketers understand the importance of pivoting to building owned audiences through social channels and personal brands but it won't replace the scale of organic search traffic they're losing.
The data below was shared by Cloudflare Founder-CEO Matthew Prince.