Bots now outnumber human traffic on the web. Cloudflare’s CEO wants AI companies to pay for it

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    "url": "https://fortune.com/2026/09/18/cloudflare-ceo-matthew-prince-ai-bots-human-web-traffic-pay/",
    "title": "Bots now outnumber human traffic on the web. Cloudflare’s CEO wants AI companies to pay for it",
    "author": "Diane Brady",
    "excerpt": "Good morning. Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince expected web traffic from automated bots and AI agents to surpass human traffic at the end of next year. Instead, it happened in May, with Cloudflare reporting almost 60% of requests to websites coming from bots. At that rate, he says, there could be 1,000 times as much automated traffic as human traffic in five years. Many are AI crawlers ingesting content to train models that may never send a reader (or a cent) back to the site. Prince wants to change that. “Companies need to get paid by the AI companies for what is the fuel that runs these AI systems,” he told me from his office in downtown New York at One World Trade. These are, after all, his customers. To that end Cloudflare - which manages traffic for more than a fifth of the web and counts 80% of the top AI companies as customers - this week announced a new “Disallow AI Training” setting that lets a website stay indexed for search on a crawler while blocking it from training on content. Apple , Google and Microsoft have agreed to the deal. The announcement is one of the first real mechanisms publishers have to separate “index me” visitors from “train on me” crawlers, and it comes as Sony and Warner Music , news outlets and even major dictionary publishers pursue copyright suits against AI companies over intellectual property claims . Prince points out that AI is changing...",
    "summary": "Microsoft has agreed to use Cloudflare's new “Disallow AI Training” setting, which allows websites to be indexed for search while blocking content from being used for AI training.",
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    "image_url": "https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/GettyImages-2271201121-e1789725122894.jpg?resize=1200,600",
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    "published_at": "2026-09-18T10:00:40Z",
    "article_sentence": "Apple , Google and Microsoft have agreed to the deal.",
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    "related_company_domain": "microsoft.com"
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