Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said on June 23, 2026, in an interview at Axios House that he thinks AI is going to destroy small businesses, arguing that smaller firms will be disadvantaged in an era where AI agents handle purchasing on people's behalf.
June 23, 2026 · Cloudflare
"AI Is Going to Destroy Small Businesses"
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince warns that as AI agents make purchasing decisions for consumers, small firms will struggle to get chosen — raising barriers to entry and pushing markets toward consolidation around large players.
"Imagine you're a small business and you're trying to convince an agent to buy from you. How do you do that? I think it's incredibly hard."
Higher barriers
Harder for new & small firms to be selected by agents
Consolidation
Large, visible companies gain further advantage
The web's broken economics
Scraping vastly outpaces traffic sent back
Pages scraped by AI firms for every visitor referred back to source sites — the higher the column, the less value returned to creators.
250:1
OpenAI
6,000:1
Anthropic
Columns scaled to ratio magnitude · Anthropic scrapes ~24× more per referral than OpenAI
75%
Zero-click searches — answers returned with no visit to the source site
2027
Year bot traffic is forecast to surpass human web traffic
+600%
Growth in Cloudflare's internal AI usage over three months
How the buying decision shifts to the agent
User instructs
"Find the best mangoes at the lowest price"
→
Agent decides
Searches, compares, pays & arranges delivery autonomously
→
Big firms win
Greater visibility & resources get the agent's pick
Agrees
Mom-and-pop stores risk being buried under agents while large companies gain further advantage.
Pushes back
The warning may reflect Cloudflare's own role as a traffic intermediary; "machine-readable" trust could become a new path for small firms. Concrete cases of agents rejecting merchants remain scarce.
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