Cloudflare's Threat to Google: A Hole in the Search Rankings
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince recently stated that 'everything wrong' online can be attributed to Google's fault. This statement was made during an interview on The Verge's Decoder podcast, where he described a plan to default all of Cloudflare's free customers to blocking Alphabet (GOOGL) from using their pages for AI training, starting September 15.
The new 'Disallow AI Training' setting is part of the recommended preset for new ad-supported sites. This means that Googlebot can still crawl for Search, while publishers use Google-Extended to opt out of training future Gemini models and certain Gemini grounding uses. The question remains what this control costs if sites use it.
Prince's leverage lies in Cloudflare's scale, as he estimates the company handles '20-plus percent' of the internet. He argues that search ranking is crucial for websites, and if Google loses access to this data, it will have a ripple effect on the entire online ecosystem.