AI is eating its sources. This graph is alarming for both supply (content creators) and demand (AI engines). Is the economic model of the internet collapsing?

Let me try to break down what’s happening.

Search engines scraped website content (supply) and paid back in traffic (demand).

It was a working trade-off: traffic in exchange for content.

But AI engines, including Google Search, with its AI summaries, now keep the traffic to themselves. The zero-click searches at Google are now 75%.

That exchange rate used to be healthy:
– 10 years ago: 2 pages scraped → 1 visitor
– 6 months ago: 6 pages scraped → 1 visitor
– This month: 18 pages scraped → 1 visitor

And for AI engines? Even worse:
– OpenAI: 1,500 pages → 1 visitor
– Anthropic: 60,000 pages → 1 visitor

AI lives on good content, but doesn’t return favor (traffic) anymore.

As a result, producing good content will no longer be viable.

What’s the alternative?

Here’s one idea: Pay-per-Crawl, according to Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince. Let tools like Cloudflare (which handles much of the web’s traffic) add a paywall for bots that scrape your website.

If AI relies on quality content, then funding it is a good idea.

My question to you:
– Would you give this new model a try?
– What other models could fix this broken exchange?