The crawl before the fall… of referrals: understanding AI’s impact on content providers

by David Belson and Sam Rhea

Content publishers welcomed crawlers and bots from search engines because they helped drive traffic to their sites. The crawlers would see what was published on the site and surface that material to users searching for it. Site owners could monetize their material because those users still needed to click through to the page to access anything beyond a short title.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) bots also crawl the content of a site, but with an entirely different delivery model. These Large Language Models (LLMs) do their best to read the web to train a system that can repackage that content for the user, without the user ever needing to visit the original publication.

The AI applications might still try to cite the content, but we’ve found that very few users actually click through relative to how often the AI bot scrapes a given website. We have discussed this challenge in smaller settings, and today we are excited to publish our findings as a new metric shown on the AI Insights page on Cloudflare Radar.

Visitors to Cloudflare Radar can now review how often a given AI model sends traffic to a site relative to how often it crawls that site. We are sharing this analysis with a broad audience so that site owners can have better information to help them make decisions about which AI bots to allow or block and so that users can understand how AI usage in aggregate impacts Internet traffic.

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