“Bots don't click on ads. They don't respond to pretty swirls of paint and what we traditionally think of as a brand.”
Decoder with Nilay Patel · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · September 2026
Context
Prince kept being asked at conferences when automated traffic would overtake human traffic online, and each time Cloudflare pulled the data the date moved earlier — until in May his team told him it had already happened. He now expects automated traffic to be a thousand times human traffic within five years. His point is that someone has to pay for the infrastructure carrying all of it, and the advertising model that funded the web for thirty years doesn't work on machines.
Transcript
…our business. And I think the thing that we've recently started to think about is the business model of the internet is changing dramatically. And we're sort of trying to help work on shaping what that future business model of the internet looks like and how can we make it as healthy as possible.
…that's fine. That's a shift. That's just a notable shift, right? The business model of the internet has dramatically changed because of AI, because of bot traffic, because of AI scrapers, the whole thing. Describe what you think the business model of the internet is right now and what it should be.
…the traffic. And the challenge of that is if you have, first of all, a thousand times more traffic, someone's got to pay for the infrastructure to power that. Like that's going to require bandwidth, that's going to require servers, that's going to require a lot of things in order to make that happen. And the traditional model of how to pay for that, which was advertising, doesn't work for bots. Bots don't click on ads. They don't respond to pretty swirls of paint and what we traditionally think of as a brand. And so we've got to come up with something else that's going to power that just incredible, insatiable demand that's going to be put on the internet going forward. And that's what I'm spending a lot of my time trying to think about what that's going to look like.
When you describe that as a business model, that sort of implies that there's going to be customers and revenue and profits. And I don't know if any of that's true.
I mean, I think there's, I mean, there's certainly a lot of revenue. Well, there's
maybe for the Cloudflares and the Googles of the world, but for the
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