Cloudflare says AI agents are a 'bane' for some website owners

Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince told the company's third quarter earnings call that some customers now regard AI agents as "a bane to their business and want to keep them away", according to a report published by The Register on 6 November 2026.

Prince's complaint was about economics rather than malware. He described a hypothetical agent sent to find him somewhere to eat after a day of investor meetings. "It might go and scour the internet and look at 1,000 different restaurants' websites, pull down 1,000 different menus, and then I might choose to only go to one of those," he said. "The problem is that 999 of those restaurants have now had a cost that is just been applied to them, but they are not getting any benefit."

He acknowledged that web search has always sent some low-value traffic to publishers, but argued the scale is now different. Cloudflare has previously predicted that agentic activity will be a thousand times greater than clicks from humans, the report said.

Prince also used the call to warn about the PHP2SHELL vulnerability. He said nation-state actors and criminals had likely exploited it before it was disclosed. "These vulnerabilities, like the PHP vulnerabilities that were disclosed the other day, had been in the wild for years," he said. The company is reviewing its own logs for signs of past abuse, he added: "I know that we're going to find examples of that."

He offered no comfort on the wider picture. "It may seem like the sky is falling with the number of new security vulnerabilities that have been reported over the last few weeks," Prince said. "I wish I could tell you we were through the worst, but we're not." He argued Cloudflare stands to benefit, because the breadth of its network and customer base means it is "among the first to receive quiet disclosure of new vulnerabilities" and can remediate them before they become public.

The same traffic ratio underpinned a second prediction. Prince suggested containers are nearing the end of their usefulness, calling them "a significant improvement over bare metal or even virtual machines" that helped drive the growth of hyperscale clouds and mobile apps. But, he said, "the container-based architecture of the hyperscalers and neoclouds just can't keep up in a cost-effective way with the new agentic paradigms of today". The Register noted this is a self-interested view, as Prince pitched Cloudflare's serverless Workers product as the alternative.

Cloudflare sells products that block agents, reduce the cost and traffic impact of agentic activity, or let site owners charge for it. Prince said demand is growing quickly and claimed that since 1 July, "approximately five percent" of the web had opted in to the company's content protection products. He named Meta as a customer and said Meta's new "Muse" agents would help Cloudflare by generating more agentic traffic that third parties want to control.

The company reported year-on-year revenue growth of 39 per cent and record quarterly revenue of $782.5 million. Investors responded positively, sending Cloudflare shares up around 15 per cent in after-hours trading, recovering earlier losses incurred when major US indices fell about four per cent.