Content Independence Day: No AI Crawl Without Compensation!
Cloudflare, July 1,2025
Almost 30 years ago, two graduate students at Stanford University - Larry Page and Sergey Brin - began working on a research project they called Backrub.
That, of course, was the project that resulted in Google. But also something more: it created the business model for the web.
The deal that Google made with content creators was simple: let us copy your content for search, and we'll send you traffic. You, as a content creator, could then derive value from that traffic in one of three ways: running ads against it, selling subscriptions for it, or just getting the pleasure of knowing that someone was consuming your stuff.