Cloudflare data shows: "The most ethical" AI company might also be the biggest free rider on the entire internet - IT Home

IT Home, April 13th news, according to today’s report from Business Insider, the latest data released by Cloudflare reveals a key reality: AI companies are consuming the internet on a large scale, but the feedback they provide is extremely limited.

Cloudflare provides infrastructure for about 20% of the internet and continuously monitors the frequency of AI crawlers scraping web pages, as well as how these platforms generate traffic back to websites through referrals. “Crawling-to-Referral Ratio” has become the core metric to measure this relationship, fundamentally reflecting the gap between acquisition and feedback.

By early April 2026, the data gap is particularly evident. Anthropic lags far behind with a ratio of 8,800 to 1, meaning that every 8,800 crawls only result in 1 referral visit.

OpenAI has a ratio of 993 to 1, also showing a significant gap. In comparison, Microsoft, Google, and DuckDuckGo perform closer to traditional internet models.

The number of crawling requests per referral visit is as follows (IT Home note: data covers web activity from April 1 to April 7, 2026, excluding native applications):

Anthropic: 8,800

OpenAI: 993.3

Perplexity: 152.9

Microsoft: 30.4

Google: 5.6

DuckDuckGo: 1.5

Anthropic’s performance is particularly noteworthy. Known for its long-standing reputation as a “more ethical” AI company, it is favored by some users. However, this set of data reveals another layer of “ethical issues”—how AI companies treat the internet ecosystem that provides training data and information sources.

Traditional internet is built on a default exchange relationship: websites allow search engines to scrape content for free in exchange for traffic that can be converted into revenue. Generative AI is breaking this mechanism. Chatbots provide direct answers, eliminating the need for users to click through to the original web pages.

The result of this change is that platforms gain far more value than they give back. In some cases, high-frequency crawling can even increase website operating costs.

Anthropic previously questioned Cloudflare’s statistical methods and stated that with the launch of new features, referral traffic is increasing. However, the overall trend is already very clear and difficult to ignore.

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