Content Independence Day, one year on — building the business model for the agentic Internet

Cloudflare says the web is shifting from an open, human-clicked model to an agentic Internet driven by AI systems.

AI adoption and non-human traffic have surged, while referral traffic to publishers has declined sharply.

AI crawlers now dominate web crawling, and Cloudflare is blocking AI training crawlers by default for new domains unless owners opt in.

The company says the old search-and-referral business model is breaking down, creating a new market for content access and compensation.