Cloudflare data show AI crawlers outpace referrals, raising publisher revenue concerns
NET•NET•NET•NET•Tekedia Capital cited Cloudflare data showing AI crawlers extract far more pages than they send back as referrals, raising publisher revenue risks.
Anthropic ranked the biggest outlier, with about 2,800 webpage requests per referral for July 1-7, down from roughly 8,800 in early April.
Cloudflare flagged volatility, with Anthropic’s ratio hitting about 24,700-to-1 in the first week of May.
OpenAI ranked second, ahead of Perplexity; Microsoft and Google posted lower ratios, while DuckDuckGo neared balance at about 1 referral per 3 crawls.
The shift toward AI answers over outbound links threatens the ad- and subscription-based model that historically funded web publishing.
