Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, speaking at Web Summit in Lisbon on Wednesday, said Google was abusing its monopoly position in search to scrape content from the web in order to feed its AI models, while not paying the websites whose content it was copying.
In a conversation with Fortune on the MEO arena’s centre stage, he urged executives at Google parent Alphabet to pay website publishers for the content they need to train their large language models.
When asked for comment on Prince’s claims, Google told Fortune that it believes its referral traffic has remained stable year on year, and that it is focused on providing more high-quality clicks (for instance, from readers who don’t immediately hit the back button when landing on a source website). Google says it gives sites the option to opt out of AI crawling without hurting their referrals or ad placement.
Cloudflare provides backend services for the web, such as content delivery networks, cybersecurity, and denial-of-service attack mitigation. “Eighty percent of the leading AI companies are CloudFlare customers,” Prince noted during his remarks.
He then turned to Google, which has a 90% share of the search market.
