Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sep 26, 2026 · 1h 18m · 53m saved
With Matthew Prince, Co-Founder and CEO of Cloudflare
Automated traffic overtook human traffic on the internet in May 2026, according to Cloudflare's data. Two months earlier, the company's own forecast had put that crossover in the first half of 2027.
Advertising has paid for the web for 30 years. Matthew Prince said bots do not click on ads, so the sites they read need another way to get paid, and Cloudflare, which sits in front of more than 20% of the web, is building one.
"If you extrapolate that out — with the giant caveat that I've gotten every prediction wrong so far — five years from now we think automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online."
Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, on Decoder with Nilay Patel. His company runs a network across more than 350 cities, and in May he cut about a fifth of its staff, a decision he explained in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. He and his wife also own the Park Record, the local newspaper in Park City, Utah.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 78 minutes of audio, 25 minutes of reading.
Here are the 24 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Bot traffic passed human traffic in May, and Prince expects it to reach 1,000 times human traffic within five years
Cloudflare's forecast had put the crossover in 2027
Bots do not click on ads, so he wants them to pay a fraction of a penny for each page they read
Data is the one AI input he expects to get scarcer, while talent and chips become easier to find
His local newspaper expects to earn more from AI licensing this year than from digital ads
Reddit gets at least seven times what the New York Times gets per unit of content from AI licensing, in his account
From September 15, Cloudflare's free customers block Google's AI training crawler by default
Most of the May layoffs came from roles that measure or audit work, not from engineers
An investor-relations task that took about 20 people two weeks now takes three minutes
Cloudflare is moving toward 12 direct reports per manager, from about six, but not the 50 Mark Zuckerberg has suggested
1. Rebuilding the Internet
The host recalled that on the show about two years ago Prince described Cloudflare as a service that makes the internet faster and protects it from bad guys. Prince said that is the line he uses at a cocktail party when he wants to end the conversation.
Cloudflare wants to rebuild the internet as it should have been built
"What I'd say if I actually was interested in talking to the person more is probably that Cloudflare is trying to rebuild the internet the way it should have been built from the beginning if we knew how important it was going to be." — Matthew Prince
He said the network runs in more than 350 cities and thousands of data centers. It secures online applications and the employees who use the internet, and it hosts applications built on its own infrastructure, which he called the fastest-growing part of the business.
"And I think the thing that we've recently started to think about is that the business model of the internet is changing dramatically, and we're trying to help shape what that future business model looks like and how we can make it as healthy as possible." — Matthew Prince
