Publishers face an existential crisis as artificial intelligence companies extract their content without providing fair compensation, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warned at an event in Cannes. Christine Wang reported for Axios. Prince revealed striking statistics about the imbalance between content scraping and traffic referrals. Ten years ago, Google crawled two pages for every visitor it sent to publishers. Today, Google’s ratio has grown to 18:1, while OpenAI scrapes at 1,500:1 and Anthropic at a staggering 60,000:1. “People trust the AI more over the last six months, which means they’re not reading original content,” Prince explained. Users increasingly rely on AI summaries instead of clicking through to source articles, eliminating publishers’ advertising revenue.