Can Cloudflare make AI companies pay creators?

AI companies increasingly crawl and use content from the open web, while creators and publishers often receive neither meaningful traffic nor compensation in return. Kim Isenberg speaks with Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudflare, about the company’s plan to reshape that relationship — from giving website owners more control over AI bots to the shift from Pay Per Crawl to Pay Per Use.

They also discuss Cloudflare’s rules for distinguishing search, training and AI-agent traffic, the relationship between Google Search and AI answers, and the bigger questions: should Cloudflare have the power to decide which bots can access the web, and can the open web survive without a new economic model for original content?