Cloudflare’s 2025 Annual Founders’ Letter Cloudflare celebrates 15 years since its launch in 2010, marking progress, challenges, and future directions for the Internet. --- What Has Changed and What Has Not? Progress: Encryption on the Internet grew from less than 10% in 2010 to over 95% today, with Cloudflare playing a key role via Universal SSL. IPv6 adoption has increased but remains slow despite Cloudflare’s continued efforts, causing issues due to IPv4 scarcity and rising costs. Constant: The Internet’s fundamental business model has been consistent: create compelling content, get discovered, earn revenue mostly via traffic through ads, subscriptions, or sales. Ads act as the Internet’s micropayment system; despite requests, Cloudflare never built an ad blocker to not undermine this system. --- The Challenge: Traffic ≠ Value Traffic-based rewards incentivize clickbait and ragebait, which reduces content quality. Cloudflare has faced calls to moderate content at the infrastructure level but believes the real solution is a healthier incentive system for content creators. AI-driven changes may enable a better Internet by changing discovery and reward mechanisms. --- From Search Engines to Answer Engines The past 15 years’ primary discovery system: Search Engines—traffic-generating “treasure maps” leading users to content. The future: Answer Engines — AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude directly provide answers, reducing clicks and traffic to original content. This shift hurts media companies and research firms by dramatically reducing their traffic. --- Short Term Pain Industries monetizing on traffic, especially media and research, face significant revenue challenges. Answer Engines summarize content, drastically reducing site visits, advertisement clicks, and subscriptions. Agents serving multiple users exacerbate the problem by enabling free riding on subscriptions. Without change, the content ecosystem risks collapse, threatening the Internet’s richness. --- Rewarding Better Content: A Hopeful Outlook Content powers AI; AI companies recognize the need to support content creators financially. Tools like Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control help restrict content scraping without compensation. Emerging deals favor creative, original, community-driven content (e.g., Reddit), reminiscent of the early Internet’s best qualities. AI-driven Internet will value unique, local, and original content over “ragebait” or spammy material. --- A New Internet Business Model Large Language Models (LLMs) approximately map human knowledge but reveal gaps ("holes") like Swiss cheese. Future revenue models may reward creators filling these gaps rather than just generating traffic. Portion of AI companies’ subscription fees and ad revenues could be pooled and distributed to these valuable content creators. AI companies might direct content creation to underrepresented topics, incentivizing richness and diversity. Content access will become a key competitive edge for AI providers beyond just hardware and talent. --- Cloudflare’s Role Cloudflare aims to catalyze this new, fairer business model supporting diverse AI companies and content creators. A level playing field is crucial so both legacy and new entrants contribute fairly—no free riding on content. Market tipping is anticipated soon if pioneering participants step up or are compelled. --- Supporting the Ecosystem Cloudflare focuses on helping build a better Internet through open, collaborative, standardized solutions. Success depends on cooperation among infrastructure providers, AI companies, and content creators. Cloudflare plans partnerships and tools to empower even smallest publishers to control content and licensing. Positive signs include AI companies acknowledging responsibilities and publishers engaging