Cloudflare Says AI Agents Add Costs for Website Operators

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said some customers see AI agents as a cost because automated systems can visit many sites without buying anything. On the company’s third quarter earnings call, he described an agent checking 1,000 restaurant websites and menus before a user selected one restaurant. In his example, 999 businesses would bear the resulting cost without receiving a benefit.

Prince said ordinary web searches have long sent some low-value traffic to sites, but he believes agent activity could operate at a much greater scale. Cloudflare has previously predicted that agent traffic could become one thousand times greater than clicks from humans. That estimate is the company’s forecast, not a reported measurement of current traffic. Related coverage has examined container data isolation, a separate infrastructure issue. Readers can also review Cloudflare’s vulnerability intelligence work and its coverage of AI models for agent decisions. These stories provide wider context, not evidence about the restaurant example.

Why AI Agents Raise Website Costs

Prince’s restaurant example framed the issue as a mismatch between the resources a site uses and the value it receives. An agent could collect menus across many businesses, while its user ultimately chooses only one. The source did not quantify the cost to each restaurant or say how many sites currently face this pattern.

Cloudflare offers products that can block agents, reduce the traffic and cost effects, or let organizations monetize traffic generated by AI. Prince said demand for those products was growing quickly. He claimed that since July 1st, “approximately five percent” of the web had opted in to Cloudflare content protection products.

Prince said Meta was already a customer. He also said Meta’s new “Muse” agents could create more agent traffic that third parties would want to manage. These remarks described Prince’s view of potential demand; the source did not provide a separate customer count or traffic measure.

Cloudflare Connects AI Agents to Infrastructure

Prince also argued that container-based infrastructure may struggle to serve what he called new agentic paradigms cost-effectively. He acknowledged that containers improved on bare metal and virtual machines, and said they helped fuel hyperscale clouds and mobile applications. His criticism focused on whether their economics could keep pace with the level of agent activity Cloudflare expects.

He pointed to Cloudflare’s serverless Workers service as an alternative to containers. That positioning reflects the company’s commercial interest in the debate. Cloudflare’s forecast of a 1000:1 ratio of bot to human traffic underpinned Prince’s argument, but remains a projection attributed to the company.

The earnings call also covered security vulnerabilities and Cloudflare’s revenue. Prince said attackers may have exploited PHP2SHELL before disclosure and that the company was reviewing logs for evidence. He warned that recent vulnerability disclosures might not mark the worst of the security situation, while describing Cloudflare as among the first to receive quiet disclosures and remediate flaws.

Cloudflare reported quarterly revenue of $782.5 million, up 39 percent year on year. The source said investors sent the company’s shares up by around 15 percent in after-hours trading. For website operators, Prince’s account leaves a practical question: whether to block agent visits, absorb their costs, or use tools intended to manage or monetize them.