Cloudflare has blocked 416 billion AI bot requests since July 1st.

as large Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince said at WIRED’s Big Interview event in San Francisco on Thursday that the Internet infrastructure company has blocked more than 400 billion AI bot requests for its customers since July 1.

The move comes after the company announced Content Independence Day in July — an initiative with prominent publishers and AI companies to block AI crawlers by default in content creators’ work unless the AI ​​companies pay for access. As of July 2024, Cloudflare has provided customers with tools to prevent AI bots from removing content. Cloudflare told WIRED that the number of AI bots blocked will reach 416 billion as of July 1, 2025.

The business model of the Internet has always been to produce content that drives traffic [to a website] “What I think people don’t realize is that AI is a platform shift. The business model of the Internet is changing dramatically. I don’t know what it’s going to change to, but it’s something I think about almost every waking hour,” Prince told WIRED Executive Editor Brian Barrett.

As a company, Cloudflare offers to make accessing content online faster and safer. But as the AI ​​industry grows and the AI ​​giants emerge, Prince says he’s increasingly focused on how Cloudflare can move beyond its position to prevent consolidation and protect the Internet as a place where businesses and creators of all sizes can survive — or, ideally, thrive.

“We need to be able to make sure that businesses big and small thrive on a level playing field,” Prince said. “That’s the future we’re trying to play for. It’s the best thing for our business because more people are going to be our customers. It’s more internet for us to protect.”

Prince specifically highlighted his concerns about Google’s policies on search crawlers and artificial intelligence. As a major AI player striving for dominance, Google combined search and AI crawlers, so blocking its AI scraper also blocks a site’s ability to be indexed in Google search. This move has put content creators in a bind, as they don’t want AI models to be trained on their creations, but usually need their position in Google search to help audiences find their content.

“You can’t opt ​​out of one without opting out of both, which is a real challenge — it’s crazy,” Prince said. It should not be the case that you can use your monopoly position yesterday to leverage and have a monopoly position in tomorrow’s market.