Cloudflare, a company that runs 20% of the web, just flipped a switch that could end the open internet as we know it, forcing AI companies to pay for the content they’ve been taking for free.

The foundational deal of the modern web, a handshake agreement that powered two decades of search and content, is officially dead. Cloudflare just put a price on scraping the internet, and it’s coming for artificial intelligence’s free lunch.

Almost 30 years ago, two Stanford grad students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built Google on a simple bargain: content creators would let them copy the entire web in exchange for traffic. For years, that traffic powered ad revenue, subscriptions, and the growth of online media. Google mostly upheld its end of the deal. But that era is collapsing under the weight of AI.

On July 1, Cloudflare, one of the internet’s core infrastructure companies, declared “Content Independence Day.” In a landmark policy shift, the company announced it will now block AI crawlers from scraping sites hosted on its platform unless those bots pay content creators for the data they consume.

“Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world’s leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content,” CEO Matthew Prince announced in a blog post. “That content is the fuel that powers AI engines, and so it’s only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.”

This is a sharp, aggressive turn from the web’s traditionally open access ethos. Cloudflare argues it’s long overdue. AI tools like ChatGPT and Google’s own AI Overviews are now answering user questions directly, effectively strip-mining websites for information while sending almost no traffic back to the original source.

“Instead of being a fair trade, the web is being stripmined by AI crawlers with content creators seeing almost no traffic and therefore almost no value,” Prince said.

Publishers, we see you! 🙌 Cloudflare just launched pay per crawl to put control over your content back where it belongs. Now, crawling is more transparent and controlled, by default, creating a better web ecosystem for creators like you. This is about real content… pic.twitter.com/yatB5LSBIm — Cloudflare (@Cloudflare) July 2, 2025

The Web as Swiss Cheese

The numbers are stark. Cloudflare claims it’s already 10 times harder to get traffic from Google than it was a decade ago due to features like the answer box. But the new AI models are far worse. According to Cloudflare’s internal metrics, OpenAI drives 750 times less traffic than traditional Google search, while Anthropic drives a staggering 30,000 times less. The reason is simple: people are asking ChatGPT instead of Googling. The content still gets used, but the creators have been completely cut out of the value chain.

Using its position as a gatekeeper for roughly 20% of all websites globally (around one-fifth of all web traffic passes through Cloudflare’s network), Cloudflare is now forcing the issue by charging a toll.

But the plan goes further than just blocking bots. Cloudflare aims to build a new content marketplace where AI companies and creators can trade directly. Compensation would be based not on clicks, but on how valuable the content is for training AI models. To explain this, the company uses a quirky metaphor: imagine an AI’s knowledge is a block of Swiss cheese. The holes represent knowledge gaps. The more your content fills one of those holes, the more it’s worth to an AI company.

It’s an ambitious proposal that challenges the entire web economy, which still judges value by how viral something is. Cloudflare is betting that filling gaps in machine knowledge is a more stable long-term market than chasing fickle human attention. It also hints at something more radical: the end of the free and open web as we knew it.

This move marks the dawn of the pay-to-train era. OpenAI has already signed high-profile licensing deals with publishers like Reddit and the Financial Times. Other AI giants are quietly inking data partnerships or scraping whatever they can until they get blocked. But Cloudflare’s decision is the first time a major infrastructure provider has flipped the default setting for a huge portion of the internet.

Our Take

The real story here is not just technical; it is economical. We are watching the rise of a new class of digital middlemen, companies that will broker access between the creators of web content and the AI models that feed on it. In a post-click internet, training data is the new currency, and Cloudflare just positioned itself as a major bank.

The company says its goal is to usher in a new golden age for creators. “We believe that if we can begin to score and value content not on how much traffic it generates, but on how much it furthers knowledge,” Prince said, “we not only will help AI engines get better faster, but also potentially facilitate a new golden age of high-value content creation.”

That sounds nice. But it also raises messy questions. Who decides what counts as high value? Who gets paid, and how much? If content is optimized for AI rather than people, what happens to the soul of the web? The darker possibility is a content Cold War, where publishers wall off everything and AI companies hoard exclusive data deals, making the web more fragmented and less open than ever before.

Whether or not Cloudflare’s “Swiss cheese” model takes off, this much is true: AI broke the old search-based web economy. On July 1, Cloudflare drew a line in the sand. For the first time in the age of generative AI, the pipes of the internet are fighting back.

The internet as we know it runs on clicks. Billions of them. They fuel ad revenue, shape search results, and dictate how knowledge is discovered, monetized, and, at times, manipulated. But a new wave of AI powered browsers is trying to kill the click. They’re coming for Google Chrome.

On Wednesday, the AI search startup Perplexity officially launched Comet, a web browser designed to feel more like a conversation than a scroll. Think of it as ChatGPT with a browser tab, but souped up to handle your tasks, answer complex questions, navigate context shifts, and satisfy your curiosity all at once.

Perplexity pitches Comet as your “second brain,” capable of actively researching, comparing options, making purchases, briefing you for your day, and analyzing information on your behalf. The promise is that it does all this without ever sending you off on a wild hyperlink chase across 30 tabs, aiming to collapse “complex workflows into fluid conversations.”

“Agentic AI”

The capabilities of browsers like Comet point to the rapid evolution of agentic AI. This is a cutting-edge field where AI systems are designed not just to answer questions or generate text, but to autonomously perform a series of actions and make decisions to achieve a user’s stated goal. Instead of you telling the browser every single step, an agentic browser aims to understand your intent and execute multi-step tasks, effectively acting as an intelligent assistant within the web environment. “Comet learns how you think, in order to think better with you,” Perplexity says.

Comet’s launch throws Perplexity into direct confrontation with the biggest gatekeeper of the internet: Google Chrome. For decades, Chrome has been the dominant gateway, shaping how billions navigate the web. Every query, every click, every ad. It’s all been filtered through a system built to maximize user interaction and, consequently, ad revenue. Comet is trying to blow that model up, fundamentally challenging the advertising-driven internet economy.

And it’s not alone in this ambitious assault. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is reportedly preparing to unveil its own AI powered web browser as early as next week, according to Reuters. This tool will likely integrate the power of ChatGPT with Operator, OpenAI’s proprietary web agent. Launched as a research preview in January 2025, OpenAI’s Operator is an AI agent capable of autonomously performing tasks through web browser interactions. It leverages OpenAI’s advanced models to navigate websites, fill out forms, place orders, and manage other repetitive browser-based tasks.

Operator is designed to “look” at web pages like a human, clicking, typing, and scrolling, aiming to eventually handle the “long tail” of digital use cases. If integrated fully into an OpenAI browser, it could create a full-stack alternative to Google Chrome and Google Search in one decisive move. In essence, OpenAI is coming for Google from both ends: the browser interface and the search functionality.

Goodbye clicks. Hello cognition

Perplexity’s pitch is simple and provocative: the web should respond to your thoughts, not interrupt them. “The internet has become humanity’s extended mind, while our tools for using it remain primitive,” the company stated in its announcement, advocating for an interface as fluid as human thought itself.

Instead of navigating through endless tabs and chasing hyperlinks, Comet promises to run on context. You can ask it to compare insurance plans. You can ask it to summarize a confusing sentence or instantly find that jacket you forgot to bookmark. Comet promises to “collapse entire workflows” into fluid conversations, turning what used to be a dozen clicks into a single, intuitive prompt.

If that sounds like the end of traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the death of the familiar “blue links” of search results, that’s because it very well could be. AI browsers like Comet don’t just threaten individual publishers and their traffic; they directly threaten the very foundation of Google Chrome’s ecosystem and Google Search’s dominance, which relies heavily on directing users to external websites.

Google’s Grip is Slipping

Google Search has already been under considerable pressure from AI native upstarts like Perplexity and You.com. Its own attempts at deeper AI integration, such as the Search Generative Experience (SGE), have drawn criticism for sometimes producing “hallucinations” (incorrect information) and awkward summaries. Simultaneously, Chrome, Google’s dominant browser, is facing its own identity crisis. It’s caught between trying to preserve its massive ad revenue pipeline and responding to a wave of AI powered alternatives that don’t rely on traditional links or clicks to deliver useful information.

Comet doesn’t just sidestep the old ad driven model, it fundamentally breaks it. There’s no need to sort through 10 blue links. No need to open 12 tabs to compare specifications, prices, or user reviews. With Comet, you just ask, and let the browser do the work.

OpenAI’s upcoming browser could deepen that transformative shift even further. If it is indeed designed to keep user interactions largely inside a ChatGPT-like interface instead of linking out, it could effectively create an entirely new, self-contained information ecosystem. In such a future, Google Chrome would no longer be the indispensable gateway for knowledge or commerce.

What’s at Stake: Redefining the Internet

If Comet or OpenAI’s browser succeed, the impact won’t be limited to just disrupting search. They will fundamentally redefine how the entire internet works. Publishers, advertisers, online retailers, and even traditional software companies may find themselves disintermediated—meaning their direct connection to users is bypassed—by AI agents. These intelligent agents could summarize their content, compare their prices, execute their tasks, and entirely bypass their existing websites and interfaces.

It’s a new, high-stakes front in the war for how humans interact with information and conduct their digital lives. The AI browser is no longer a hypothetical concept. It’s here.

Opinion

The pace of generative AI development has been swift and astonishing. Just recently, Google un-veiled a new AI tool called Veo 3 which can create ultra-realistic videos. In a demo in a news report, it was able to make a news story complete with video, audio, backgrounds, and a news anchor reading copy, virtually indistinguishable from anything created in a human-based, real news-room. The completed AI-generated video was ready within five minutes.

Although amazing and somewhat alarming, AI has been making media for a while, and it is increasingly difficult for humans to tell the difference between AI and human-generated content. An AI band and its music had been featured on Spotify with a million monthly followers before anyone noticed. A Canadian journalist has finally come clean and admitted that he created the AI band The Velvet Sundown as an experiment. But not before real human followers had gotten sucked into the hoax.

Besides many other issues with generative AI, these two examples bring up serious implications for the future of the internet. First, AI can generate content much faster than humans can. Second, the content that they generate is often indistinguishable from human-made content.

Google DeepMind recently launched Veo 3, AI technology that can be used to generate video, including fake newscasts, that are almost indistinguishable from human-made video. (File)

AI “slop” describes mass-produced, quickly made AI generated content that lack oversight or fact checking that is often generic. AI can also put together all kinds of slop by reusing human-generated content that exists on the internet and re-purposing it to create endless regenerated content. YouTube is especially prone to this, with numerous channels dedicated to self-help, philosophy, best-of lists, biographies, advice, yada yada yada, all made to be attractive and clickable to get the views that the YouTube economy is based on. You can recognize a YouTube AI slop channel by looking at its description page; they have usually joined YouTube within a year or so and are able to publish several videos or more a week, sometimes more than one a day, that have a similar style with minimal differentiation.

What could AI slop mean for the internet? Up until recently, information on the internet has been put there by humans. AI slop can be generated much faster than human content, and so far there are no meaningful limitations on AI to consume (steal) any content on the internet to create in slop form.

Unlimited amounts of AI slop could then be produced. As AI creation outpaces human content creation, it is reasonable to extrapolate that AI will be the dominant source of content on the internet, human created content eventually in the minority.

Beyond the vast volume of AI content that will be created, AI tools are so incredibly good at “learning” from human creators that it will be very difficult to discern reality on the internet. At the very least, this would lead to human confusion and, at the very worst, it could mean someone’s death if they follow the wrong advice from some AI slop.

AI has no ethics or morals or any consequences or liability with regards to human harm from its negligence. For those who have any experience, we can use some critical thinking to suss out crazy content that should be ignored, but for those who don’t know, it can be very dangerous.

So a few years go by and AI content overtakes the internet.

What does that mean? It means that any content that is consumed is likely AI-generated and it is so good at imitating what used to be human content that we cannot tell whether what we are consuming is real.

The internet that once held great promise to bring humans universal knowledge, connectivity, freedom and education will have been turned into a wasteland of unreal, unbelievable, and untrustworthy slop. In other words, the end of the internet will be brought about because it will no longer have any value to humans.

What can be done? The AI train has left the station and there’s no getting it back.

We’ve already conceded (by lack of action) that our AI overlords are able use any human created content to train AI to serve content back to us. Human news media have taken it on themselves to label AI content and that should be a first step. The implications for many of the downsides to AI need serious discussion and AI slop is just one such issue among many for this incredibly transformative technology.

On the plus side, when the internet does get shut down, we can finally put away our phones, rub our eyes, open our front doors and walk outside and say “Hi” to our neighbours in the real world. Because at least we know everything in real life is real. For now.

(This article was completely written by a human).

» David Nutbean was a technology instructor at RRC Polytech, a Digital Literacy Administrator for a school division, and a computer science teacher. He writes from his home in Oakville, Man.

The launch of Google’s AI Mode has sparked not only curiosity among everyday users but also a true uproar within the SEO community and the broader digital marketing world. And for good reason: this new feature promises to revolutionize how people consume information online, inevitably reshaping the strategies for visibility, traffic, and content monetization that have defined the internet for decades.

What exactly is Google’s AI Mode and how does it work?

Unveiled during Google’s annual developer conference on May 20, 2025, AI Mode represents what CEO Sundar Pichai described as “a complete reinvention of search.”

Unlike AI Overviews, which many users have already seen at the top of their search results for the past year, AI Mode replaces traditional search results entirely. Instead of providing links, Google uses a chatbot powered by Gemini 2.0, its most advanced AI model, to generate a concise, real-time article that answers your query directly on the results page.

The system combines Google’s real-time information resources—such as the Knowledge Graph and data from Google Shopping—with advanced reasoning and summarization capabilities. Thanks to techniques like query fan-out, AI Mode performs multiple related searches simultaneously, explores various subtopics, and delivers a unified, clear response—often so complete that users feel no need to click further.

Why is AI Mode causing concern among SEO experts and marketers?

While some praise AI Mode for its ability to deliver faster, more in-depth, and more contextual responses, the innovation has also triggered alarms among SEO specialists, publishers, and content creators.

The root of the concern? Google now generates AI-powered content that draws directly from websites, yet presents it so comprehensively that users may never visit those sites. This growing phenomenon, known as zero-click searches, has become a major source of controversy.

For digital marketers and publishers, this trend threatens to drastically reduce CTR (Click-Through Rate), the key metric that measures how effectively a site attracts traffic from search rankings. In other words, even if a page ranks highly, if users get all the information they need from Google’s AI summary, organic traffic to websites could plummet.

Some observers, dubbed the SEO apocalypse crowd, warn that this marks the beginning of the end for traditional SEO and organic traffic as we know them. According to this perspective, if Google continues to centralize the information experience within its own ecosystem, creators and websites will see their exposure, revenue streams, and influence slowly fade away.

Is this truly the end of the open internet?

The debate is far from settled. As BBC reported, industry voices are raising concerns about the long-term consequences of AI Mode on the internet’s structure.

“If Google makes AI Mode the default in its current form, it will have a devastating impact on the internet,” warned Lily Ray, VP of SEO Strategy and Research at marketing agency Amsive, in an interview with BBC in June 2025.

Ray emphasizes that AI Mode could drastically reduce the main revenue source for most content creators, while fundamentally altering how billions of people experience the internet daily.

Some experts go even further, suggesting we are at the dawn of a new paradigm: the “machine web.” In this future, websites will be designed for AI consumption, not for human audiences, and reading chatbot summaries will become the primary way people consume information.

Are big tech companies already shaping this AI-dominated future?

Evidence suggests the shift toward AI-dominated information ecosystems is well underway:

The New York Times is reportedly licensing its content to Amazon’s AI .

is reportedly licensing its content to . Google is paying Reddit $60 million a year to train its AI on user-generated data.

to train its AI on user-generated data. Dozens of major publishers and media conglomerates have signed similar deals with OpenAI and other tech giants.

However, critics point out that only massive platforms with vast amounts of valuable data are benefiting from these agreements. Small and medium-sized publishers—often the lifeblood of diverse, independent information online—are being left behind.

What does Google say about AI Mode and its impact?

Despite the backlash, Google remains confident that AI Mode enhances the user experience and provides new opportunities to explore information.

According to Sundar Pichai, AI Mode allows for:

More diverse source recommendations.

More detailed responses to complex queries.

In-depth topic exploration with the ability to ask follow-up questions.

Pichai proudly stated at the 2025 developer conference, “As people use AI Overviews, we see that they are more satisfied with the results and search more frequently. It is one of the most successful search launches of the past decade.”

In short, Google argues that AI Mode improves search and aligns with what users want.

What does this mean for the future of SEO and digital marketing?

For digital marketers, SEO professionals, and content creators, AI Mode represents both a challenge and a wake-up call. The traditional SEO playbook may no longer be enough to ensure visibility, traffic, and business success.

Many experts suggest that brands and creators will need to:

Adapt content to appeal not just to human readers, but also to AI summarization algorithms.

Explore new monetization models beyond traditional website traffic.

Invest in direct relationships with audiences through email, apps, and owned platforms.

Monitor closely how AI Mode evolves and how Google balances AI-generated content with web source visibility.

So, is AI Mode the end of the internet as we know it?

The answer, for now, is both yes and no. AI Mode undeniably signals a radical transformation in how we search, discover, and consume information. Whether it marks the death of the open, link-driven internet—or the birth of a more efficient, AI-enhanced information ecosystem—will depend on how Google, regulators, publishers, and users navigate this uncharted territory.

One thing is certain: the internet is changing, and those who fail to adapt risk being left behind.

Google’s pivot to AI-powered search is proving disastrous for the digital news media landscape.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the company’s latest tools, including its wildly hallucinating AI Overviews and chatbot-style AI Mode, are causing the traffic being sent to publishers to plummet as users no longer feel the need to click through to the actual source of information, cutting already-slammed journalists off from ad revenue and subscriptions.

It’s an existential threat. News publications, already gutted by the internet, have been hit hard as they try to adapt to a post-organic-search world.

Per the WSJ, search traffic to Business Insider’s media empire fell by a whopping 55 percent between April 2022 and April 2025. Last month, the company cut roughly 21 percent of its staff, with CEO Barbara Peng noting that it had to “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.”

How to respond to this existential threat remains a major point of contention.

“Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine,” The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson told the WSJ. “We have to develop new strategies.”

Some publications, like the New York Times, are taking legal action, with the newspaper suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.

It’s a thorny debate, with publishers accusing the AI industry of exploiting their content without ever fairly remunerated. Plummeting traffic due to AI-enhanced search on Google is only exacerbating the tension.

Google is under threat from AI itself. Apple executive Eddy Cue admitted in federal court earlier this year that Google searches in the company’s Safari browser had fallen for the first time in 20 years, indicating the end of traditional search as we know it could be nigh.

Confusingly, Google has since disputed the claim and has remained adamant that its number of total searches is still going up — while going all-in on its glitchy AI products.

“This is the moment that propels us forward in our ability to achieve our mission and really deliver a transformed search experience for users,” Google’s head of knowledge and information division Nick Fox told Adweek.

The digital media landscape and Google are now caught in an unfortunate race to the bottom. The tech giant’s search and AI features rely on a steady stream of news and original content. But by cutting the creators of that material out of a once lucrative organic search-driven revenue source, that stream could soon be reduced to a trickle, if not an incestuous swamp of AI-generated nonsense.

Well-established outlets will likely weather the storm better. Research revealed last week that Google’s AI Overviews favors major news outlets, while smaller publications struggle for visibility.

Meanwhile, the media industry has no other option but to look for new business models in light of an existential threat.

Legal challenges to Google’s indiscriminate scraping of copyrighted materials are likely to continue to crop up as well.

“Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,” said trade association News/Media Alliance CEO Danielle Coffey in a statement last month, following Google’s announcement of its AI Mode feature. “Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft.”

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