On Cloudflare’s Q3 earnings call, CEO Matthew Prince said some customers see AI agents as “a bane to their business and want to keep them away,” The Register reports.
His example: an agent that scrapes 1,000 restaurant menus so you pick one. “999 of those restaurants have now had a cost… but they are not getting any benefit.” Cloudflare has predicted agentic traffic could be a thousand times greater than human clicks.
He also said they’re hunting their logs for earlier use of recently disclosed PHP flaws, expecting to find nation-state and criminal activity that predates public disclosure.
My take
Site owners need a way to say yes to good bots and no to scrapers that never convert. Originators of agents should identify themselves and cache hard.
God Bless, and May the Source Be with You!
