Azeem Azhar's Exponential View
Inside the collapse of the internet economy (and what comes next)
08 Oct 2025
Azeem Azhar sat down with Matthew Prince, co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare. Matthew is a rare operator with the vantage point to answer a simple question: if agents do the reading, who gets paid? This conversation is a practical map of how AI “answer engines” upend the web’s traffic-funded model – and what could replace it.Chapters: (00:46) The currency of the web is dying (06:08) Google's inflection point (10:08) Why a broken business model might save the internet (14:44) The incentivization of ragebait (20:38) Content scarcity as a solution (24:35) What could a new content business model look like? (28:51) The challenge of pricing information (29:31) How Cloudflare thinks about the creator economy (32:06) Should smaller companies pay less? (34:24) Can markets solve this without Congress? (39:11) How does the agentic web affect content? (43:40) A rare chance to redesign the internet Produced by EPIIPLUS1 Ltd and supermix.io Production and research: Chantal Smith, Hannah Petrovic, Nathan Warren and Marija Gavrilov. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Full Episode
Today, I am thrilled to welcome Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare. It's a company that sits at the very heart of the internet. You might not know of it, but I'm pretty certain that at some point in the last 24 hours, Cloudflare has helped you get something done on the web. The company funnels about a fifth of all internet traffic to us.
Now, as we move into the age of AI, Matthew is once again at the heart of thinking about how that technology is going to affect the internet at scale. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Viewers know I love the pipes of the internet, and that means I have a soft spot for this company. I've even got the t-shirt. But that doesn't mean I'm going to give our guest an easy ride.
Welcome to the show, Matthew. Thanks for having me. We're at an inflection point in the way the internet gets used. How broken is the content model that has funded it for the last 25 years?
Yeah, I think that actually it's been amazing how well that has worked for the last 25 years. The basic interface of the web for the last 25 years has been search. And Google obviously is the dominant search engine out there.
And the way that Google works that you all know is if you type something into Google, especially this sort of Google of 10 years ago, you got back what was effectively a treasure map, a bunch of links pointing you to search. The search wasn't the act of Google returning the links. You then had to continue the search to find what it was that you were looking for.
And in the process of doing that, you generated traffic to a bunch of sites on the web. And Google actually, and some other companies, provided the tools that then allowed those content creators, those site owners, turn that traffic into revenue or turn that traffic into ego, just knowing that someone was reading it.
What's happened, and it really started about eight to 10 years ago, it's picked up speed over the course of the last year, is that we're switching from a web where the primary interface is search and search engines to one where the primary interface is AI and what I would call answer engines. go to ChatGPT and you type a question, it doesn't give you a list of links to go to.
It gives you the answer. And in fact, even Google today, if you go to it and ask a question, increasingly it's putting on the top of the page what they call AI overviews. And those AI overviews are essentially answers to whatever question you have. And the problem with that is you're not sending traffic then to the rest of the web.
And so if the currency that the web was built on, the currency that funded the web was traffic, the problem is that as we switch from search engines to answer engines, that currency is going away. And so we've got to figure out some other way to compensate those content creators to make the content, which is what fuels fundamentally the web and even what fuels these AI engines.
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