Matthew Prince recently sat down with David Rubenstein for an interview, during which the Cloudflare CEO highlighted how the internet’s core business model—search—is undergoing rapid transformation.

“And if you look back 10 years ago, if you did a search on Google you got back a list of 10 blue links. And we have data on how Google processed those 10 blue links. And the answer was that for every two pages of a website that Google scraped they would send you one visitor, right? So scrape two pages, get one visitor. And that was the trade.”

The amount of scraping Google does hasn’t changed but that rate of 2 to 1 is now 6 to 1.

“What’s changed? The answer is that today, 75 percent of the queries that get put into Google get answered without you leaving Google, get answered on that page. So if you want to ask, when did David Rubenstein start Carlyle? About 10 years ago it would take you to maybe a Wikipedia page or something else. Today, the answer comes up right on the page, and you don’t have to go anywhere else.”

Without the click to the source, the creators stop making the content.

“So it was 2:1 10 years ago for Google. It’s 6:1 today. What do you think it is for OpenAI? 250:1. What do you think it is for Anthropic? 6,000:1, right?

And so the business model of the web can’t survive unless there’s some change, because more and more the answers to the questions that you ask won’t lead you to the original source, it will be some derivative of that source. And if content creators can’t derive value from what they’re doing, then they’re not going to create original content.”