IT Home reported on April 13th that according to Business Insider today, the latest data released by Cloudflare reveals a key reality: AI companies are "consuming" the internet on a massive scale, but their feedback is extremely limited.
Cloudflare provides infrastructure for about 20% of the internet and continuously monitors the frequency of AI crawlers scraping web pages, as well as how much traffic these platforms refer back to websites. The "scraping-to-referral ratio" has become a core metric for measuring this relationship, essentially reflecting the gap between acquisition and feedback.
The data gap in early April 2026 was extremely pronounced. Anthropic lagged far behind with a ratio of 8800 to 1, meaning it took 8800 scrapes to bring back 1 referral visit.
OpenAI's ratio was 993 to 1, showing a similarly significant gap. In contrast, Microsoft, Google, and DuckDuckGo performed closer to the traditional internet model.
The number of scraping requests corresponding to each referral visit is as follows (IT Home note: the data is based on web activity from April 1st to April 7th, 2026, excluding native apps).
Anthropic: 8800
OpenAI: 993.3
Perplexity: 152.9
Microsoft: 30.4
Google: 5.6
DuckDuckGo: 1.5
Anthropic's performance is particularly noteworthy. It has long been known as a "more ethical" AI company, which has earned it favor among some users. However, this data reveals another layer of "ethical issues"—how AI companies treat the internet ecosystem that provides them with training and information sources.
The traditional internet is built on a default exchange relationship: websites allow search engines to crawl content for free in exchange for visit traffic that can be converted into revenue. Generative AI is breaking this mechanism. Chatbots provide answers directly, eliminating the need for users to click through to the original web pages.
The result of this change is that platforms gain far more value than they give back. In some cases, high-frequency crawling behavior can also increase website operating costs.
Anthropic has questioned Cloudflare's statistical methodology and stated that referral traffic is increasing as new features are launched. However, the overall trend is already very clear and difficult to ignore.
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