A new warning from one of the world’s leading internet security executives signals growing trouble for publishers in Thailand and across the globe: users are increasingly trusting AI-generated answers and rarely click through to source links, threatening the sustainability of traditional news and information platforms (Engadget).
Cloudflare CEO, in a recent interview with Axios, paints a stark picture of the shifting digital landscape, where search traffic referrals have experienced a dramatic decline. This trend, he explains, is the result of internet users placing growing faith in AI chatbots’ responses, choosing summaries over original sources, and in the process eroding the ability of publishers to monetize their content. “Publishers are facing an existential threat,” the executive stated. The implications are not limited to the U.S. or Europe—Thailand’s publishers, bloggers, and local content creators are just as vulnerable in this rapidly evolving online ecosystem.
The CEO backed these concerns with revealing data: a decade ago, for every two web pages that Google crawled on a publisher’s site, it sent one visitor back to the source—a healthy ratio that kept digital publishers afloat through ad revenue and subscriptions. Just six months ago, that number had shifted to one visitor for every six pages crawled. Today, it’s one for every eighteen. The situation is even more severe with leading AI firms: OpenAI currently sends only one visitor for every 1,500 pages it crawls, and Anthropic’s ratio is an alarming one visitor for every 60,000 pages. These figures mark a rapid deterioration from six months earlier and suggest that as generative AI usage proliferates, the traditional web traffic that media outlets rely upon is drying up at an accelerated pace.
This isn’t merely a problem of numbers or ad impression losses. For Thai newsrooms, independent journalists, and educational content providers, diminishing web traffic translates directly into lower revenue and could undermine the diversity and quality of information available to Thai society. As more Thais use AI chatbots—whether for health information, educational support, news updates, or travel research—they may never click through to the original articles, losing access to fuller context, in-depth analysis, and vital local nuance.
Senior executives in Thai media and digital rights advocates have repeatedly expressed concerns about this imbalance. “Thailand’s local publishers have worked for decades to build reliability and trust with their audiences,” remarks an official from the Thai Media Professionals Association, “but if readers stop visiting our websites and rely only on AI-generated excerpts, we lose more than revenue—our content loses cultural and social depth.”
Global publishing trends show the scale of the challenge. Major outlets worldwide have reported similar drops in referral traffic, especially when users interact with AI features, either through smart assistants or search results enhanced with AI summaries (Nieman Lab). The situation in Thailand is mirrored in declining ad revenues, especially among regional and language-specific publishers who already face financial pressure.
Furthermore, Cloudflare’s CEO notes that many AI companies have routinely ignored basic web protocols—a “no crawl” robots.txt instruction intended to block unwanted data scraping for training AI models. This means Thai publishers’ content, protected by such digital locks, is still being extracted by AI bots, which then feed it into large language models without direct compensation or referral. Efforts to counteract this have recently escalated: Cloudflare, a company whose services are used widely in Thailand to protect websites from hacking and spam, launched “AI Labyrinth” earlier this year. This new tool deploys a clever tactic of presenting unauthorized scrapers with a maze of believable yet artificial pages, exhausting the scrapers’ resources and making it harder for AI models to extract real site content.
The publisher–AI relationship is now marked by a mounting sense of powerlessness. According to the Cloudflare CEO, “I go to war every single day with the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably Americans, the Israelis, all of them who are trying to hack into our customer sites… And you’re telling me, I can’t stop some nerd with a C-corporation in Palo Alto?” The quote encapsulates the frustration felt throughout the industry—a frustration increasingly shared by Thai site operators.
Thai publishers are now grappling with fundamental questions: Is there a fair way to allow AI bots to use content without destroying reader revenue? Should they block AI bots entirely, potentially limiting the spread of locally relevant information in the global knowledge space? Or should a system of compensation and attribution be established, possibly modeled on licensing schemes already under consideration in the European Union and Australia (Reuters)?
At the heart of this debate is the behavior of ordinary internet users—students, professionals, and families across Thailand—who are now interacting daily with increasingly sophisticated AI systems. For health, education, government services, or tourism advice, these users may be unaware that the “answers” they receive have been filtered and summarized by an AI, often without the full, nuanced reporting of the original Thai-language sources. The risk is that important context or warnings disappear, and Thai voices become drowned out in a sea of globalized, generalized AI output.
Academic experts in digital media at leading Thai universities have warned that the declining link-clicking habit could stifle the vibrancy of the national information environment. “Our cultural stories, local research, and community news are part of Thailand’s collective memory,” notes a digital communications scholar at a major Bangkok institution. “If these are algorithmically diluted or hidden, we lose not just economic opportunities, but pieces of our history.”
Globally, some industry groups are urging AI companies to place more prominent, user-friendly source links in results panels, and to share usage data with publishers to help quantify the real loss. Others are urging governments—including Thailand’s Ministry of Digital Economy and Society—to consider regulatory solutions, perhaps via tax, licensing, or the negotiation of fair compensation. Still, in the absence of enforcement, technical solutions such as Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth may become stopgap measures—potentially at the expense of educational accessibility and the free exchange of information.
What might the future hold for Thai publishers? If the trend of users bypassing original articles continues, smaller websites could vanish, local newsrooms may be forced to close, and valuable Thai-language digital content could decline sharply. Some analysts suggest a hybrid model where AI platforms enter into public-private content deals, ensuring both fair payment and responsible, accurate curation of information that includes local and regional perspectives (Brookings Institution). Others warn that unless user behavior changes—by once again clicking on source links and valuing the work of professional journalists—only a handful of large, global organizations may be left standing.
For Thai readers, the call to action is clear: whenever using AI chatbots or searching via platforms that provide direct answers, take the time to check the provided source links. Visit and read the original articles, especially those from reputable Thai news outlets, universities, and specialist blogs. In health and education, where accuracy and local context are crucial, relying solely on AI-generated summaries can result in missed information or unsafe conclusions. Thai policymakers, educators, and digital literacy advocates should reinforce the importance of seeking out, and rewarding, high-quality original content. By doing so, Thai society can not only protect its diverse digital ecosystem but also ensure that its stories, research, and voices remain visible in the age of AI.