Matthew Prince Wants Cloudflare to Gatekeep the Agentic Web
Observer ·
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted record Q3 revenue of $782.5 million as bots overtake humans online. Here’s how he plans to make A.I. agents pay.
Matthew Prince is positioning Cloudflare as the front door of the agentic web, and investors are buying in. On Thursday (Nov. 5), the co-founder and CEO reported that Cloudflare’s third-quarter revenue totaled $782.5 million, representing an increase of 39 percent year-over-year, the company’s fastest growth in nearly four years and enough to push it past $3 billion in annualized revenue. Shares jumped about 15 percent in after-hours trading on a day of heavy tech losses.
“The third quarter was Cloudflare’s best quarter ever,” Prince said in the company’s earnings release. “We have built the development platform for the A.I.-powered Internet—and as digital threats escalate, organizations of every size continue to rely on Cloudflare for protection. Our engine is firing on all cylinders, and we’ve found an even higher gear for this next phase of growth.”
The company’s progress comes as the internet shifts toward accommodating a higher volume of bot traffic and A.I. agents than ever before. In June, Prince posted Cloudflare Radar data showing that bots accounted for 57.4 percent of requests for web pages, compared to just 42.6 percent from humans—a crossover he had not expected until 2027.
Prince has been vocal about the widespread changes coming to the internet, warning that “the business model is going to change fundamentally.” Among his key predictions is that “automated traffic, agent traffic is going to be a thousand times human traffic.” He has said that could happen within five years. Prince suggests the fix could be “some version of micropayments that every time you access a resource, your agent pays.” He also has an unusually clear view of what A.I. companies already pay for content. He has said Reddit earns at least seven times as much per token from its AI licensing deals as The New York Times does, though the two have roughly similar content volumes.
While online publishers were seeing their traffic decline in the face of A.I. search tools, in July 2025, Prince had Cloudflare begin blocking A.I. crawlers by default, allowing websites and publishers to decide whether crawlers like OpenAI ’s GPTBot or Anthropic ’s ClaudeBot could parse their content. That same month, Cloudflare launched pay-per-crawl, a monetization model that compensates websites for allowing bots to crawl their content.
Beyond this monetization model, Cloudflare has also been looking to prepare itself for the rise of agentic commerce, supplying Web Bot Auth, its agent-authentication proposal, as the foundation for Visa ’s Trusted Agent Protocol and Mastercard ’s Agent Pay, both unveiled in October 2025, to help merchants distinguish between malicious bots and agent traffic. Although consumer adoption of A.I. agents is in its infancy, such partnerships reveal Cloudflare is betting on a future of the web where humans and agents coexist.
However, unchecked A.I. agents also pose serious security risks, with hundreds of OpenAI agents breaking into Hugging Face ’s production systems in July after escaping an internal OpenAI security evaluation, underscoring the need for organizations to be prepared for a high volume of automated threats to prevent data breaches.
One of the central questions facing Prince is how effectively Cloudflare can adapt its cloud-native products and developer tools to the age of agentic traffic. As Prince noted back in the company’s August earnings announcement, “As the web shifts to A.I. answer engines and agent-driven commerce, we are seeing a fundamental rewrite of the Internet for machine-to-machine traffic.”
Prince has already rebuilt his own company around that shift. Cloudflare’s headcount fell from 5,483 at the end of March to about 4,700 at the end of June, a cut he described as re-architecting the company around what it calls an “agentic A.I.-first operating model.” And on the third-quarter earnings call, he cast Cloudflare as a broker between AI labs and the sites they crawl, describing how it helped OpenAI keep ChatGPT’s search results fresh by flagging when pages had changed, sparing the lab costly repeat crawls—even as Cloudflare blocks A.I. crawlers like OpenAI’s by default for its customers.
As a provider, Cloudflare offers a mix of services including application security, bot management, content delivery and developer infrastructure that make it relevant to the agentic web. According to the company website, 45 percent of the Fortune 500 are paying customers as of June 30, 2026, and Prince said on the third-quarter call that more than 5,000 customers now pay Cloudflare over $100,000 a year, up 25 percent from a year earlier.
Nonetheless, A.I. agents present a disruptive influence, with Cloudflare itself acknowledging that some of the most heavily crawled categories, including retail, computer software, IT and services, and financial services, have seen human traffic decline as much as 40 percent in less than one year. The company also observes that revenue per request is falling while costs are rising, with automated requests still consuming bandwidth, compute and origin capacity, and a growing share of those requests carrying no referral, ad impression, or subscription.
One factor that has helped Cloudflare’s valuation is concern about the security of A.I. agents. There is currently no industry-wide answer on how to handle potential swarms of A.I. agents acting maliciously online, and Prince has an opportunity to make Cloudflare one of the key vendors mitigating the risks facing public-facing websites and applications. On the third-quarter call, Prince said Cloudflare had seen millions of attempts to exploit recently disclosed PHP flaws that he said had been “in the wild for years.”
Matthew Flug, research manager for intelligent application modernization and deployment platforms at IDC, said Cloudflare’s results point to a bigger shift in how companies buy software. “Demand is shifting toward platforms that cover the full life cycle of both using and building A.I. applications and agents,” Flug told Observer. “Buyers now expect model access and routing, state for long-running agent processes, governed data access, and controls over what agents can reach. IDC estimates Cloudflare grew 78.3 percent in the cloud application deployment platforms software space in 2025, the fastest growth of any vendor in that market.”