TED Talks Daily - How AI is breaking the internet (and what to do about it) | Matthew Prince

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

For the past 30 years, surviving as an internet business meant getting people to click on your website. But AI is now making that thousands of times harder, says Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest internet networks. He makes the provocative case for a different deal — whereby tech companies actually pay people for creating content that feeds their AI models. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Some of us are old enough to remember a world before the internet. But for a whole lot of people now, it's just like the air, the infinite thing you can ask anything of that answers back in an instant. You look for something, a page pops up. You never really wonder how it all got there or who pays for it. Those questions do have answers, and it's been the same for. for almost the entire history of the internet.

The web is driven by traffic. Traffic has been the currency of the internet, and that's what everyone has built their content to try to achieve. That was tech entrepreneur Matthew Prince. Matthew co-founded and leads Cloud Fair, one of the companies that helps run the internet's infrastructure. In his talk, he explains how the whole system actually works. You search for something.

You click a link. You land on a website, and those clicks pay for it all. The news you need, the research you rely on, the open web. But this might not be the case for much longer, at least according to Matthew. He thinks AI is about to break it, all of it. Today we have something very different. We have something that's closer to what I would call an answer engine, where you're getting the answer directly on the page.

When the answer shows up right there on the screen, you never click through anymore, which means the traffic that funds journalism, research, the whole open web, starts to dry up. This has devastating consequences on people's lives offline. But Matthew sees a way out. He argues the same shift that's breaking the old internet

could build a better one. Instead of an internet that rewards the cheapest, most inflammatory content, he wants to see one that pays people to create something genuinely new. He even has a name for the award he'd give them. That's coming up right after a short break.

And now our TED Talk of the Day. The internet is an absolute miracle. And for the last 30 years, it has been driven by a very consistent and fundamental business model that has given us everything amazing about the internet and everything not so amazing as well. I run a company that provides a lot of the internet's infrastructure. And as a result, it means three things.

One, we've had this unique view into what is going on online. Two, we care enormously about the success of the Internet. And three, I think I can share with you some of how that underlying business model is changing and why it's important. Because as that business model changes, it's going to have a dramatic effect on what the Internet is,

but beyond that, on what content is created, on what journalists get compensated for, on how researchers are able to do their research. And so it's up to all of us, as that business model of the internet changes, to make sure it changes for something we want and can learn from the mistakes that we had in the past. So to review the past, let's look at what that business model was, and we all know it, basically, which was the internet was built on, we took an idea and we put it online,

and then we drove traffic to that idea, and then from that traffic, we either sold things, subscriptions, or ads. And it's been pretty amazing to watch how that has very much driven the growth of the web and the growth of the Internet over time. And it survived a number of dramatic platform shifts. We all started browsing the Internet on browsers, on our desktop or laptop, that transitioned to be increasingly social media, which was the interface through which we consumed content.

And then we went to consuming it through our mobile devices. And yet, through all of this, the humble banner ad, has basically financed it all. Traffic has been the currency of the internet, and that's what everyone has built their content to try to achieve. And if we want to look for who's the Superman, who's the superhero that has driven this, for the last 27 years, that has been Google.

Google built not only the search engine to index how the internet works, but then they built the monetization system to actually ensure that content creators, got paid for the traffic that they generated. The Internet owes a ton to Google in the last 27 years. But the world is changing. AI is the topic de jour. And what I think a lot of people don't understand

is that AI is yet another platform shift. Think about how much more of the way that you consume information already is looking at your AI chatbot and how much more of that will be the case in the future. We can see it in a lot of things we do kind of normally. like, this is a Google search from the early days of Google, not even that long ago, when I would type something in,

like when was the first TED conference, and then I would get back basically a treasure map where I would have to continue to do the work and click on the links, generating traffic, to find what my answer was. The search wasn't over when the results returned. That was just the beginning, and you had to follow the treasure map.

That's what a search engine is. Today we have something very different. We have something that's closer to what I would call an answer engine. where you're getting the answer directly on the page. And what's amazing about that is that as a consumer, it's better for you. But what's terrifying about it is that it means traffic isn't going to the publisher's sites, and traffic is the currency of the Internet.

And so 18 months ago, publishers called us and said, are you seeing this too? And I have to confess, we weren't really paying a ton of attention, but we went into our logs, we went into our data, we pulled out that information, and we said, is it to get traffic based on the same amount of content today than it was with the Google of old?

And the answer is it's 5.2 times harder to get traffic for the same amount of content that was out there. But that's the good news. That's with Google. What is it with Open AI? 750 times harder. What is it with Anthropic? 32,000 times harder. The answer engines are giving the answers,

and people aren't following the footnotes. And this was 18 months ago. What's happened since has it got better or worse? Do you trust AI more today than you did 18 months ago? The answer is most people do, and as a result, it's actually gotten twice as hard to get traffic to contents there. You're not following the footnotes anymore.

You're actually trusting that the AI systems are giving you the right answer, and that's destroying media. Across the board, we're seeing reported numbers where media companies are seeing between a 90 and 30 percent decline in the traffic to their sites. And this is extremely problematic,

because I think journalists deserve to be able to eat. And fundamentally, if the Internet is built on traffic and this new business model isn't delivering traffic, then I'm not sure how media is going to survive unless we create a new business model. And the good news is, the AI companies want journalism. They want people out there doing research. We all want journalism.

We want people out there doing research. And so I think I'm actually kind of optimistic that there might be a solution to this problem. And here's the way I think about it. For the first time in human history, we have a mathematical model of all of human knowledge. It's not perfect, but that's essentially what all of the LLMs are. And I think about a giant block of Swiss cheese.

There's a lot of cheese, that's what we know, but we also have a lot of holes in the cheese. Those are the things we don't know. And the thing that is incredible is that what all of you want, what I want, what the AI companies want, is they want people out there filling in the holes in the cheese. They don't want you writing the story that has already existed.

They want you actually creating new knowledge. And the AI companies, I've talked to every one of them. They're all willing to actually pay for people who are creating new knowledge, creating new ideas, ideas worth spreading. That's what this new system would reward. Compare that to what the business model of media is for the last 10 years, which is not filling in the holes in the cheese, but instead, basically lighting the cheese on fire.

Incendiary cheese, right? Yet another story about what happened at 1,500 Pennsylvania Avenue told in the most inflammatory way possible. I've sat with media executives who brag about the fact that they create content for as little as possible and then write headlines that create the largest cortisol response

so that you will click on them. That's not a world we should be celebrating. That's not a world that's making the world better. if on the other hand, we actually celebrated who is making the cheese bigger, who's filling in that. Imagine in the future that you actually had AI companies that were measuring who actually advanced human knowledge mathematically over the course of the last year the most. We gave them award. We could call it the Big Cheese Award. Right? I'm not kidding. Like, how amazing would that be? And you might be thinking, okay, Matthew, you're crazy. Like, I'm the person who thinks AI is just destroying the world and technology always makes things worse.

and suddenly shared just two anecdotes that make me have some hope that this might actually be the case. The first starts 23 years ago. 23 years ago, the music industry had a huge problem. Napster, Cazaar, everyone was stealing music. And then Steve Jobs stepped on stage, almost 23 years ago to the stay, and he said, we're going to do something different.

We're going to charge 99 cents per song, and we're actually say that you should be paying for the music that you consume. Now, that's not the business model that won, but it was the start, and it turned into what is, today, Spotify and all the other systems that are out there, which is basically $10 a month, all you can eat music. And it's pretty amazing. Last year, Spotify alone sent over $10 billion to music creators in revenue, which is, and again, that's in addition to titles, TikToks,

YouTube, all of Apple Music, everybody else, more money is going to music creation than any time in human history. So technology can be pie expanding. And I think it's a bottle. In fact, I thought was so important that I flew up to Stockholm to meet with Daniel, like the founder of Spotify, and he said, you know, it's pretty amazing. We know when someone goes to Spotify and they type in Taylor Swift, shake it off, that we can give them what they're looking for. But every once in a while someone comes in and types in something like, I want a song about how much fun it is to dance disco with your cat. And nobody's written that, but they know that nobody's written that. And so they actually go back and they take those queries and they publish them back,

to music creators. And this is the moment you're all going to think you're doing life wrong, but there's a guy who lives in Denmark who makes 40 million years a year writing songs for unfulfilled Spotify queries. And I think that's beautiful. That's filling the holes in the cheese, because when I look for a song, when I look for something that, what I'm looking for is an emotion, and this person is helping me find a song to resonate that way. And I think that's a model for what could happen as well. Another story starts a little bit closer to home. So this This is the Park Record newspaper. The first place I ever saw my name in print,

my hometown newspaper from Park City, Utah. It was dying. So three years ago, my wife and I bought it. We did not buy it because we thought it was going to be a great business. We bought it because we thought local news was important. In fact, the only KPI, we had no financial KPI. The only KPI we focused on was how much could we increase voter turnout? And the answer was we got it from the low 20 percent to over 60 percent in the last election

in three years. which is amazing, right? Local news matters. But here's the crazy part. Terrible business, right? Except it's not. We're likely going to make more in 2026 off licensing our content to AI companies

than we do off digital advertising. Why? Because if you're traveling to Park City, Utah, and you want to know what's the great new restaurant, what's the cool band that's coming to town, we're the only ones that have it. So think about how amazing that would be. Think about how if in the future,

the business model of the new AI-driven internet actually rewards the media we're all craving, local, unique, original content. That's what I'm super excited about. But there are problems. Challenges. It's kind of like any of the superhero films where the hero of the last movie

becomes the villain of the next. And so our good friends at Google, ugh. They are holding this back. They believe that they have a God-given right to all of the content online. They shouldn't have to pay for any of it. And they have a huge advantage. In fact, it's hard to believe this,

but every other AI company was actually started to oppose Google, right? That's what OpenAI started with. Anthropics just spin off of Open AI, X-AI. All of this was all to say, we can't let Google win this entire game. How much of an advantage do they have? Well, we looked at this again, and we found that every single page that Open AI sees,

Google sees three, right? four for Microsoft, in Microsoft's case, five in the Anthropics case, 21 or 22 in X-A-I's case, an enormous advantage that Google has, and they want to hold on to that advantage. In fact, they're playing incredibly dirty. They're saying to people who are content creators,

you can't stop us from training on your content, or we will take you out of search. Horrible. Superman, how far are you fallen? And so I was pretty depressed, I have to confess, thinking we're on the cusp of creating something amazing, on the cusp of creating a better internet. And yet, I have to just realize

that no AI company's top priority is paying content creators. What's their top priority? Beating Google. Which gave me an idea. Kind of a wonderful idea. An idea which is going on right now, and it's working, which is we're saying,

don't charge for all the content that's out there. just charge the AI companies the ability to catch Google. And I don't think that's the end game, but I think it might be the iTunes moment. It might be the point that shows us content is worth paying for. Everyone should be out there, and we can create a better business model for the internet.

And so I am hopeful that on this stage, not too long from now, I get to hand out one of the first Big Cheese Awards. And I really appreciate it. Thank you. That was Matthew Prince, speaking at TED, 2026. If you're curious about TED's curation, visit TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today.

Ted Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner, and Tonzica, Sung Marnivon. Additional support from Daniela Ballereseo, Christopher Faisi Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Ban Ban-Ban-Chang, Brian, and Lainey-Lat. Learn more at podcasts. ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet.

Thanks for listening.