Cloudflare CEO says people aren't checking AI chatbots' source links

Companies that develop generative AI always make it a point to say that they include links to websites in the answers that their chatbots generate for users. But Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has revealed to Axios that search traffic referrals keep plummeting. Publishers are facing an existential threat, he said, because people aren't clicking through those chatbot links and are relying more and more on AI summaries without digging deeper.

Prince told Axios that 10 years ago, Google sent a publisher one visitor for every two pages it had crawled. Six months ago, the ratio was one visitor for every six pages, and now it's one for every 18. OpenAI sent one visitor to a publisher for every 250 pages it crawled six months ago, while Anthropic sent one visitor for every 6,000 pages. These days, OpenAI sends one visitor to a ...