How AI bots are breaking the internet—and who should pay for it

The internet is changing faster than most of us realize. According to Cloudflare—a company that runs infrastructure for over 20% of all websites—more than half of all internet traffic now comes from bots and AI systems, not people. These bots are constantly scanning websites to train artificial intelligence models (the systems behind chatbots like ChatGPT). The problem? Nobody's paying for all that activity.

For the last 30 years, the internet ran on advertising. Google showed you ads, you clicked them, and that paid for everything. But bots don't click ads. They just take information and leave. This means website owners—from local news outlets to Wikipedia—aren't getting paid when AI companies use their content. Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince wants to change that by bringing back an old internet idea: micropayments (tiny fractions of a penny). When an AI company's bot visits your website, they pay you a small amount. Just like Spotify pays musicians when you stream a song, AI companies would pay content creators for access.

This could reshape which websites thrive. Right now, the internet rewards clickbait and outrage because that's what gets attention—and attention gets ads. A payment system based on genuine knowledge might instead reward local news, unique research, and real expertise. Prince thinks this could create what he calls a "golden age" of information creation, where creators are paid for truthful, valuable content instead of rage-inducing headlines. But it's still unclear whether this micropayment future will actually work or if most people will just move their content to platforms like TikTok instead.