Welcome back to Tech Brief. Today, Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince sounds the alarm on the widening gap between Google’s crawling and real traffic to publishers’ sites. Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent along. Six months ago it was six to one. Now it’s eighteen to one. That means search bots are pulling down more content than ever, while human readers aren’t clicking through. As Christine Wang at Axios puts it, “publishers face an existential threat in the AI era and need to take action to make sure they are fairly compensated for their content.” With AI models digesting—and often republishing—that same material, news outlets could see revenue shrink even further. We’ll keep you posted on how publishers and platforms might respond to protect journalism in the digital age.
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