Last week, Stratechery interviewed Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince. In addition to talking about the company's business, he also focused on expressing concerns about the Internet content ecosystem: Artificial intelligence may be shaken the "traffic business model" created by Google.

1. Google: The largest "sponsor" of the Internet in the past 25 years

Prince reviewed the development logic of the Internet in the past:

This is why Google is both the world's largest search engine and the largest advertiser. It can be said that without "traffic sponsors" like Google, the Internet content ecosystem would not be so prosperous.

2. The pattern is collapsing: Search → Answer

But now the situation has changed.

This is more efficient for users, but it is devastating for content producers. Because there is no traffic, there is no advertising revenue, and no one is willing to continue producing content.

There may be only two situations in the future:

No matter which, the existing Internet ecosystem will be completely rewritten.

3. China's differences and trends

The domestic situation is different from that in the United States, and the traffic is not that concentrated. According to data from iResearch and QuestMobile, please see:

And under the impact of AI, this trend is more obvious. For example, primary and secondary school students are used to asking "doubao" directly, and search engines have almost no sense of existence for them.

4. Dilemma of content platform

The situation of the text content platform is particularly difficult.

AI acceleration will make this happen faster. As the new generation of users grows, traditional content platforms will inevitably gradually lose traffic until they die.