{"id":518103,"date":"2025-10-21T22:45:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T22:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/518103\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T22:45:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T22:45:13","slug":"cloudflare-ceo-matthew-prince-is-pushing-uk-regulator-to-unbundle-googles-search-and-ai-crawlers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/518103\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is pushing UK regulator to unbundle Google’s search and AI crawlers"},"content":{"rendered":"

After earlier this year launching a marketplace that allows websites to charge AI bots<\/a> for scraping their content, web infrastructure provider Cloudflare is pushing for increased regulation in the AI sector. <\/p>\n

The company\u2019s chief executive Matthew Prince says he\u2019s in London to speak with the U.K.\u2019s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), where he\u2019s proposing stricter rules on how Google should be able to compete in the AI race, given its search dominance.<\/p>\n

The CMA earlier this month designated Google with a special status in the search and advertising markets because of its \u201csubstantial and entrenched\u201d position. The move will allow the regulator to impose more stringent regulations beyond just search and ads, including in areas like Google\u2019s AI Overviews and AI Mode, the Discover feed, Top Stories, and News tab. <\/p>\n

According to Prince, Cloudflare is in a good position to make recommendations because it\u2019s not in the AI business itself, but has a large number of relationships with the AI companies themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t have a dog directly in the fight. We\u2019re not an AI company,\u201d Prince said, speaking at the Bloomberg Tech<\/a> conference in London this week. \u201cWe\u2019re not a media publisher, but we\u2019re this network that sits between them. 80% of the AI companies are our customers,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n

The Cloudflare boss believes that Google should have to compete on the same footing as other AI companies, which is not what it\u2019s doing today, he said. Rather, Google uses its existing web crawler to crawl content for its AI products and services, in addition to its search engine. This, Prince said, gives Google an unfair advantage.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoogle is saying, \u2018we have an absolute God-given right to all of the content in the world, even if we don\u2019t pay for it, because look what we did for the last 27 years,\u201d Prince explained. \u201cAnd, they\u2019re saying we can take it and use the same crawler we use for search in order to power our AI systems. And if you want to opt out of one, you have to opt out of both,\u201d he noted.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

This, obviously, is not feasible for most, particularly those in the media business where losing search means losing about 20% of your revenue, the executive said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it gets even worse. If you block Google\u2019s crawler, it blocks their ad safety team, which means that your advertisements across all of your platforms stop working, which is just a non-starter,\u201d Prince added. <\/p>\n

Because Google bundles its crawler, it\u2019s able to get access to content that others, like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Perplexity, would have to pay for.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem is that we then will have effectively handed the game to Google,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

The solution, Prince said, is to foster a lot of competition in the market, where potentially thousands of AI companies could compete to buy content from thousands of media businesses and millions of small businesses. He suggested that what the U.K.\u2019s CMA was doing by flagging Google as a potential regulatory target was a thoughtful move, and one that indicates they\u2019re aware of Google\u2019s unique advantage.<\/p>\n

Cloudflare has also provided the CMA with data that shows how Google\u2019s crawler works and why it\u2019s nearly impossible for other players to replicate the same success Google could have. <\/p>\n

Prince isn\u2019t the only one to share these opinions in recent days. Last month, Neil Vogel, CEO of People, Inc.<\/a> the largest digital and print publisher in the United States, which operates over 40 media brands, said essentially the same thing. In an interview, he called out Google as a \u201cbad actor,\u201d saying that media companies had no choice but to let Google crawl their sites for AI content because of the way the crawlers were combined.<\/p>\n

Vogel, whose company had adopted Cloudflare\u2019s solution to block AI crawlers<\/a>\u00a0that don\u2019t pay, claimed the system was working, as he said deal discussions were underway with several large LLM providers. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After earlier this year launching a marketplace that allows websites to charge AI bots for scraping their content,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,138099,1942,33869,867,1234,168820,2443,53,16,155928,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-518103","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-policy","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-cloudflare","12":"tag-google","13":"tag-government","14":"tag-matthew-prince","15":"tag-regulation","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-uk-cma","19":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115414585981060250","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}