What does this chart show?
The number of web pages crawled by search/AI engines before a unique visitor is sent to the original content creator is increasing at a rapid rate.
Why does it matter?
The business model of the pre-AI internet was search based - consumers enter a query, receive 10 blue links, and visit a site where content creators earn money via subscriptions or ads by sharing their content. We’re now in a new paradigm where the fundamental model of the internet is answer based - consumers enter a query and get an answer. As trust in AI increases, visitors are increasingly consuming a synthesis of aggregated content and aren’t visiting the original content - 75% of google queries now get answered by the google AI summary.
If the fuel of AI output is original internet content, and content creators are increasingly unable to monetize their content because of less traffic to their original work, then how does this play out moving forward? Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, is setting out to block AI crawlers from scraping original content without compensating the creators, increasing the scarcity and value of original content in the process. While some AI companies like OpenAI have begun striking deals with content creators, others haven’t and have continued scraping - it’s clear that this arrangment won’t work for long.
The Bottom Line
The marketplace, value, and compensation for original content will likely be much different moving forward.
Chart & Data Sources: Matthew Prince of Cloudflare