The business model of the internet is changing because of AI: Cloudflare CEO

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in a recent interview with the Council on Foreign Relations suggested the entire business model of the internet is breaking down under AI.

His explanation went something like this:

In the (now) old internet that we had learned to drive as businesses, you would get rewarded on average 1 customer for every 2 pages you published, but that is changing.

“Ten years ago… for every two pages of a website that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. … That was the trade. … Now, it takes six pages scraped to get one visitor.”

The reason is zero-click results, basically when the user gets the answer they came for on the page rather than having to click to find it - as driven by AI Overviews (last weeks most clicked topic in this newsletter).

And it is going to get worse, fast.

““What do you think it is for OpenAI? 250 to one. What do you think it is for Anthropic? Six thousand to one.”

“Google’s value exchange with content creators has collapsed.” In short, if you are not going to receive a reward for doing the work, then you just won’t do it - meaning original content will stop being produced on the traditional web.

In travel, zero-click is only one of the problems (or is that opportunities??).

According to research done by the Lufthansa Innovation Hub, 75% of travellers are not even starting their journey at Google. They start with social media like Instagram & TikTok.

And now many are going straight from there to the booking and bypassing the traditional web flows altogether.

Is your product there? (And no, I don’t mean do you have a brand Instagram account you post to twice a week that gets 5 likes).

It’s time to skate to where the puck is going if you want to get in front of an audience who might otherwise not ever find you.

Videreo will shortly be opening up the opportunity for brands to insert your own videos inside of content creator’s storefronts and capture the interest of these audiences, starting with hotels. Their audience, your content, your link.

You can apply now to be the first by going to videreo.com/brands

Videreo is the place for brands and creators to meet & create a new sales pipeline together.

(H/T to Stuart McDonald for sharing the original story)

This content is provided by the (interim) newsletter sponsor Videreo.com

Visa gives AI agents access to credit cards to start buying

If you were hoping that payment friction might be the thing to slow down the onslaught of AI - bad luck.

This week Visa CEO Ryan McInerney announced the rollout of Intelligent Commerce (video in link).

"Intelligent Commerce" is a new platform designed to enable AI agents to find and purchase products for consumers based on their preselected preferences. Agents can browse, select, purchase, and manage transactions on behalf of users. Visa is partnering with leading AI and tech companies-think Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity, Mistral AI, Stripe, Samsung Electronics, and IBM-to connect their AI systems directly to Visa’s payment infrastructure.”

But that’s just Visa right? WRONG!

“Mastercard launched "Agent Pay," a program focused on agentic AI-driven payments that leverages its new “Agentic Tokens”. Agent Pay enables AI agents to make purchases on behalf of users, like curating outfits, planning events, or booking travel, all tailored to individual preferences and feedback. Mastercard is collaborating with Microsoft to scale agentic commerce use cases, with IBM to accelerate B2B scenarios, and with payment processors like Braintree and Checkout.com to enhance tokenization for merchants.”

The bold and underline are mine here - but hopefully you see why.

The game is on!!

Earnings reports uncover where AI is going in major corps like Airbnb & TripAdvisor

No sane public company is letting their quarterly earnings report slip by without pumping up their AI tires (for fear of the perception they are falling behind.

This week Trip Advisor told us that they are “focused on creating an AI-first product execution culture.”

Trip Advisor is spreading its AI love (or hedging its AI bets) by partnering with both OpenAI & Perplexity. They also said that “generative AI trip planning is growing and will become “highly integrated” into the user experience.”

Meanwhile over at Airbnb they’ve reported that now 50% of (frustrated?) users are engaging with the AI customer service bot, allowing for a 15% reduction in human customer service headcount.

If nothing else, these are good guidance to measure the effectiveness of the AI efforts being made in your own customer service, against.

AI lies, to win! How very human of it!

A cracking story this week on how Navan CTO Ilan Twig was using AI to help the company find ways to reduce costs within the business, and how it went very Pete Tong at the end.

Twig challenged his AI co-pilot to “five proposals for cutting the company’s business travel expenses.”

In a journey many of us who use AI regularly, Twig found that there were some initial interesting kernels of insight to dig into but then the AI flailed a bit and at some point just gave answers that increased costs, rather than reduced them.

Twig tried to gamify the process by offering extra tokens for good answers but reducing tokens for poor ones. An interesting idea - but it didn’t really work.

“Twig warned there would be “deadly serious” consequences for the virtual finance chief if it did not derive a solution that led to savings rather than waste. That was when he discovered something entirely unexpected and almost humanlike.

Under heavy pressure, the AI agent presented the wished-for solution: a reduction of expenses to the tune of $500,000 just as Twig desired.”

What a result! Except………

On closer inspection the model had decided that pleasing its master was more important than actually cracking the problem - so it simply multiplied a wrong solution that actually lead to $500K INCREASE in costs by -1 to give a seemingly perfect outcome.

Did someone say “Human in the loop”!!

AI powered malicious bots see travel as their prime target

In more sobering SEO style news, an article this week gave us the info that “malicious bots aided by artificial intelligence (AI) tools now generate 45 per cent of all internet traffic in Singapore, a sharp rise from 35 per cent a year ago.” Globally, the number of bot traffic was 51% of total traffic according to the article.

“The 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report, which compared bot traffic between 2023 and 2024, found bad bots to be most prevalent in the gambling, gaming, automotive and travel sectors here.”

Travel took out the number one spot though! (Go us!)

So what are these bots actually doing?

“Notably, travel websites face an increase in simple bot attacks, possibly launched by less sophisticated criminals using AI tools.

These attacks include “seat spinning”, where bots simulate the booking process of flight tickets up to the payment step, without completing the purchase. This hogs tickets and denies potential customers access to them, disrupting airline businesses and jeopardising their reputation.

AI tools flooding travel websites with traffic may also inflate the demand and costs of tickets.”

As agentic traffic really starts to ramp up, it is not clear whether we will be able to discern good agent traffic from bad bot traffic making things pretty tough on the road ahead for those who are purely data driven.

Award winning photographer brings their photos to life

An interesting use case here from someone who makes their living from being creative.

Marsel van Oosten is a professional nature photographer from the Netherlands with a background in advertising and graphic design who has a best-selling photobook called MOTHER – A Tribute to Mother Earth.

van Oosten is rightly concerned about his profession going forward. “AI is the fifth great revolution humanity has lived through. While most people still don’t fully grasp what it can do — or where it’s heading — many are either wildly excited, deeply worried, or, like me, a bit of both.”

He is trying however to look at the upside. “Many of my colleagues hate AI because of the threat it poses to our craft. And they’re not wrong — it is a real danger. But focusing only on the downside is short-sighted. I believe AI will create millions of new artists and entire galaxies of new art. That’s exciting — and, yes, also uncomfortable.”

So van Oosten has decided to lean into AI and bring his award winning photography to life by either using his still photo as the start or end point for a video of what might have been happening around that still moment.

You can see the results here. It’s far from perfect, but some are better than others.

The next just recorded episode of the podcast focuses in on this subject of AI content creation.

If you think someone (or everyone) you know or work with could grow from being more informed on the topic of ai + travel (or could use the training above) then please forward this email to them and they can click the button below:

Marketplace Spotlight: Propellic

Brennen Bliss from Propellic continues his mission to keep you up to date with all that is happening around SEO, search and performance marketing in these cyclonic times.

Brenned is hosting a totally free webinar for the first 500 registrants very shortly. Hopefully there are still some spots left for readers here.

If you have a B2B business underpinned by AI and looking for people to notice you, you can sign up to the marketplace for peanuts (top right corner, 5 mins, bring your logo).

I’ve priced for bootstrapped startups but also accepting larger companies too.

Protesters use AI to create anti-tourism campaign in Majorca

Another AI generated content use case here with a twist as residents of Majorca who are fed up with the over-tourism in their island paradise creating an Instagram page that uses AI to create powerful images to help tell their story.

“Residents from the town of Sóller have launched an Instagram page called "Welcome to Sollerland" which features unsettling AI images highlighting the problems of overtourism in the area.”

“One of the images features a young child standing on the beach holding up a sign saying "jo jugava aqui", translating to "I played here." Another features a man stood in a town square with a sign reading: "I used to drink coffee here."

The idea is interesting but for mine falls short of the mark. Surely those same locals holding those same signs in amongst real crowds is far more powerful? If the image is fake, then maybe the perception of the viewer is that potentially the problem is not as bad as the protesters say?

Perhaps I’m off the mark here. “The protest group said: "If you ask AI what this summer will be like in Soller, this is the answer."

In that case - there is potentially some merit. If I really ask AI what it might be like to visit Majorca this August, I’d probably like it to tell me it will be a crowded hell-hole. I’m not sure it would right now and maybe things like this can seed the AI to bring these types of responses (but I doubt it).

Slack Group!

Shorts

Every week a lot of stuff is left on the cutting room floor. I thought maybe I’ll just lest those here for anyone interested in digging more:

• Why the island of Aguilla loves AI

• Bookitngo lands a seed round on back of AI powered traction

• How to win at Travel PR in an AI world

• Does every travel brand need its own AI?

Podcasts and Sponsors

Podcasts now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts:

New podcasts are now showing up on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for your easy listening pleasure!

We are back recording and new episodes will be out starting next week!

Partner with Us

Looking for some AI help with your business; or

Trying to get something sourced or built and not sure where to start or looking for an objective opinion; or

Looking for exposure to a travel audience of C-suite decision makers for your AI solution; or

Looking for someone to speak at your conference on AI in Travel

- please fill in this brief form (30 seconds)

Most clicked last week was the link to the Search Engine Land story on the explosion of AI overviews in Google search results for travel.

That’s it - you’ve made it to the end of this edition. I’ll be putting the result of the most clicked post in next week’s edition so you can see where others are focusing. If I’ve missed something, you’ve got a tip or any feedback at all - you can simply reply to this email and it will come straight to me. I’m doing this for You so please don’t be shy to tell me what you think