Post Syndicated from Matthew Prince original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-2026-annual-founders-letter/

This week Cloudflare celebrates our 16th birthday. Like many 16-year-olds, we find ourselves looking around at the world we grew up in and feeling caught between the past and future. Also like many 16-year-olds, we look at all the change in the world and sometimes see risk. But, on balance, we come out incredibly optimistic for what lies ahead. What drives our optimism and fear is a recognition that change involves disruption. 

The Internet is changing more today than at any point since Cloudflare launched back on September 27, 2010. Some of that change seems undoubtedly good. Some of it is upending the way we think the Internet works.

One significant change is the rate of growth of the web itself. From 2012 through 2025, the web plateaued and by some measures even shrank. That changed in mid-2025 when there was an explosion of new websites. The popular narrative is that growth has been driven by AI "slop." And, while there is some of that, that's not the majority of what we see.

Instead, AI has unleashed a new cohort of creators. Individuals with ideas but without coding skills who, aided by so-called "vibe coding" tools, are able to bring new creations to life. We're proud that the majority of these tools have Cloudflare's developer platform as their preferred deployment target. Technology at its best allows more people to express their creativity. We have front row seats to watch students around the world building apps to solve real-world problems. Startups with new business ideas getting built in record time. Today more than 7 million developers are building the future on Cloudflare’s developer platform.

The last year has also changed in terms of who — and increasingly what — is using the Internet. We originally forecast that automated traffic would pass human traffic in the second half of 2027. The rise of agents and AI crawlers pulled that date forward to May of 2026. And, if current trends continue — which, if anything, seems conservative — automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic in just five years. Not because we believe human traffic will decline, but because traffic from agents is exploding.

For people using them, these agents are already astonishing. Ask one to find you a flight, a contractor or a cheaper phone plan, and it will read more pages in a minute than you could in an afternoon, then come back with an answer. It does the legwork so you don't have to.

But that legwork isn’t free. If you ask your AI agent to suggest where you should go to lunch, it may survey 1,000 restaurant menus in the area only to suggest one. The one restaurant may get your business, but the other 999 had to shoulder the load of serving the agent without getting anything in return. The risk here is a tragedy of the commons problem where the users benefiting from the agents and their traffic don't bear the costs of the load they put on the system and therefore don't exercise appropriate restraint.

AI has made it easier than ever for those students and startups to build something. Agents could make it much harder for anyone to find it. Today, small businesses win customers with emotion or convenience. You patronize a certain deli because the person working the counter remembers your name or because it’s part of how you define your identity. Or you shop at a local store even though you know it doesn't have the best selection or prices but it's on your drive home.

Your agent doesn't care who remembers your name, and it isn't driving home past the local store. It goes with whatever it has the most information about, and that's usually whoever has been around the longest. The risk then is that as agents handle more and more commerce, they'll make it harder for new entrants to break in. That, in turn, is likely to lead to consolidation and a less robust business environment.

We were a new entrant once. Sixteen years ago this week, we launched Cloudflare on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt while our engineers sat in the audience fixing bugs. There were eight left when we walked on. By the time we walked off, they were fixed and we were live in five data centers on three continents. Nobody's agent would have recommended us. People took a chance on us anyway. We want the next new entrants to get the same chance.

That’s what we’re playing for. Not a future with five AI companies, but one with 500,000, spread around the world. Not one where content creators wither away and die because they can't be compensated, but one where anyone can create, reach a global audience and get paid for their work. And not one where a few mega corporations win by default, but one where new entrants with better products can serve customers well, and win.

Last year we wrote about what AI was doing to publishers. This year the same shift is reaching the restaurant and the deli. What replaces the Internet's old business model is the most interesting question of the next five years. This week, we take another swing at answering it.

Like every birthday, we're celebrating by giving presents instead of getting them, and some of the presents are for the 999 restaurants. Agents crawl the web the way search engines always have: everything, over and over, whether it's changed or not. Our data suggests more than half of what good bots fetch hasn't changed since their last visit. We've been working so that crawlers see more of the web while fetching only what's new, which cuts the load on the sites they crawl. And we're giving anyone who puts content or applications online a way to get paid when agents use what they've built.

Cloudflare's mission isn't to build a better Internet, it's to help build a better Internet. That means we can't do it alone. So this week we'll also be announcing partnerships with companies and organizations that want the same future we do.

Like other 16-year-olds in this new era of AI, we get to ship our opinions. We're shipping them for an Internet that still has room for a teenager launching their first app, the deli where they remember your name, and whoever is building the next Cloudflare.

And we’ve never been more excited about it.