Anthropic, an AI company claiming "more ethical", has an 8800:1 crawl-to-referral ratio

AI companies are consuming internet content on a large scale but giving little back. Cloudflare data shows that in early April 2026, Anthropic brought only 1 referral visit for every 8800 web crawls, while OpenAI was 993:1, far higher than traditional platforms like Microsoft and Google. In traditional internet, websites allow crawling in exchange for traffic, but generative AI directly provides answers, breaking this exchange mechanism. This leads to platforms gaining much more value than they give back, and may even increase website operating costs. Anthropic once questioned the statistical method, but the overall trend is hard to ignore.