Cloudflare Chief Executive Officer Matthew Prince warned that rapid adoption of artificial-intelligence chatbots is eroding the web traffic publishers depend on, creating what he called an “existential threat” to their business models. Speaking at an Axios event in Cannes, Prince said Google now crawls roughly 18 pages for every visitor it sends to a publisher, compared with a 2-to-1 ratio a decade ago and 6-to-1 just six months earlier. The imbalance is even starker for large language-model developers: OpenAI now fetches about 1,500 pages for each referral, while Anthropic’s ratio is roughly 60,000-to-1. The comments align with Wall Street Journal reporting that users increasingly turn to conversational AI tools instead of traditional search, eliminating clicks on “blue links” and sharply reducing referrals to news sites. Publishers, long reliant on search and social platforms for audience growth and advertising revenue, are being forced to reassess strategies for getting paid when their content is ingested by AI systems. Analysts say the shift could reshape the economics of the web. Barclays, for example, has noted early signs that Google’s dominant search share is bleeding to services such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, raising fresh questions about how online content will be monetised as user behaviour moves from search results to AI summaries.