Technology CEO says Google abuses monopoly to power its AI

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince stated on Wednesday, 12th, during the Web Summit in Lisbon, that Google is abusing its monopolistic position in the search market to collect content from the internet and feed its artificial intelligence models — without paying the sites whose content it is copying.

In a conversation with Fortune on the MEO Arena center stage, he urged executives at Google parent Alphabet to pay website publishers for the content they need to train their large language models.

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When asked about Prince’s claims, Google told Fortune that it believes its referral traffic has remained stable year-over-year and that it is focused on delivering higher-quality clicks (e.g., from readers who don’t immediately hit the “back” button when entering a site).

Google says it offers websites the option to opt out of AI tracking without hurting referral traffic or ad placement.

Cloudflare provides web infrastructure services such as content delivery networks (CDNs), cybersecurity, and denial-of-service (DDoS) attack mitigation. “Eighty percent of the top AI companies are Cloudflare customers,” Prince noted during his speech.

Then he turned to Google, which has a 90% share of the search market.

“The great benefactor of the internet over the last 27 years has been Google. The great villain of the internet today is also Google,” said Prince.

He said that in the past, for every two pages Google crawled to feed its search engine, it sent an average of one visitor to those sites — traffic that publishers could monetize with advertising.

But today, according to him, Google only sends one visitor for every 20 pages it crawls.

“What’s changed is that now they put an AI overview at the top of the search results, and you don’t have to click on anything to get the answer. You don’t go to that content anymore.”

“And that’s the good news,” he continued. “The bad news is that if you look at companies like OpenAI that offer incredible tools, they do 1,500 collections for every visit. Anthropic does 40,000 collections for every visitor. And the problem is, if these new AI tools don’t drive traffic, the fundamental business model of the internet is going to collapse — certainly for media content creators, but also for small businesses and brands.”

To be fair to Google, Prince said company executives have told him they believe they should pay for content. More broadly, all the big AI companies have been saying the same thing.

“Everyone is saying we need to pay for this content. We need to give something back to the ecosystem.”

“We talk all the time [com o Google]and they say, ‘We understand.’ There are a lot of people at Google who understand this. They believe in the internet. They believe in the ecosystem. They believe in supporting you. But they are also stuck in an old business model while competing with a new model driven by big AI platforms.”

And because Google refuses to pay, other companies are also reluctant to compensate, he said.

“I’m afraid it would be very difficult to tell OpenAI or Anthropic that they have to pay for something that Google gets for free. That’s not fair.”

The situation is made worse by the fact that if a site publisher wants to signal to Google that it does not want its content scraped to feed Gemini — Google’s AI system — that site runs the risk of being demoted in Google’s search index, as the same command is used in both cases, Prince argued.

“It’s not just that you drop out of search results; it’s that because Google controls so much of the ad monetization infrastructure, if you block their AI bots, your ads stop working in some cases. That’s insane, right?” Prince said.

There is a debate in the SEO industry (search optimization) about whether this is true. Google offers a command called “Google Extended,” which blocks AI trackers and “does not affect a site’s inclusion in Google Search” or its ranking in results, according to the company.

However, some believe that the less Google knows about a site, the less likely it will be used as a reference — in part because this prevents it from being used as a source by Gemini.

When asked if he considered this an abuse of monopoly, Prince responded:

“Totally, absolutely. And the reason we’re not talking about it is because no one sees what’s going on behind the curtain.”

“Google is using its dominant position in search to leverage itself in the area of ​​AI,” he said.

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