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MANILA, Philippines — Generative AI has taken the internet by storm. As Filipino users increasingly rely on AI tools for quick answers, the good old practice of engaging directly with original content is fading fast.
Cloudflare warns that while these tools may be convenient, they take content without permission and a cent to pay — hurting creators in the process.
Blogs, news media and industry experts alike risk having their work scraped, reused and republished without proper attribution. Even worse, AI tools can twist content out of context, turning it into a possible source of misinformation. 
Potential readers are also being lost to AI, as users may no longer feel the need to visit the original sites where the very answers came from. 
Cloudflare’s ASEAN Vice President Kenneth Lai said this shouldn’t be the case. 
“AI tools come and scrape the content and just go back and use the content for their own benefit. So the content creator gets absolutely nothing,” he told Philstar.com in an exclusive interview. 
“Cloudflare business says enough is enough,” he said. 
Lai stressed that building a safer, more reliable internet also depends on creators being able to take control of their work and prevent AI from using it without permission or credit.
“AI companies take the content and take it out of context to serve their purpose. So therefore, we need to be smart about it,” he said. 
What the data shows. In the first eight months of 2025, Cloudflare Radar found that 21% of AI crawlers detected on news sites were used for searching information, while 65% were for training.
Among the 14 industries the firm tracked, news and publications were the most heavily crawled by AI bots for search queries — showing that people turn to AI tools and chatbots to look up current events.
But do people click on the referred sites? Cloudflare discovered that some of the top AI chatbots rarely drive traffic back to the websites where the information originally came from.
During the same period, Cloudflare Radar found that OpenAI’s ChatGPT bots referred users back to a site only once for roughly every 200 crawls. Anthropic’s Claude performed even worse, with just one referral for every 5,400 crawls.
Why this matters. For firms and individuals earning from views and clicks, this means AI bots that freely crawl and scrape information can potentially siphon off readers and drive down revenue.
Cloudflare, a leading cloud and cybersecurity company, has developed a mechanism to help organizations protect their content from AI crawlers through a permission-based model.
“We are building capability to help companies to block these attempts so that we return the control back to the content creators,” Lai said. 
“It's to allow the content creator to charge these AI companies. So therefore, you can monetize that again,” he added. 
In July, the firm announced it would be the first internet infrastructure provider to let website owners block AI bots from crawling their content and choose which bots to allow. 
The move comes as some AI companies still fail to let IP addresses verify their bots’ identity, disclose the purpose of their crawls, or respect site rules on what bots can and cannot do.
The feature, first introduced in September 2024, has since gained support from several media and publishing companies.
Apart from giving firms the power to decide which AI bots can crawl their sites, Cloudflare is also working on a pay-per-crawl model. 
As the name suggests, site owners may choose to monetize crawler access by charging AI firms every time their bots want to scrape content. 
The option is still being tested and is not yet available to the public.
With artificial intelligence only advancing, Lai warned it would be troubling if creators lost the incentive to produce work, especially as both companies and independent creators rely on online content for income.
“Because can you imagine if content creators don't get rewarded and recognize what they do? They stop creating content. If we arrive at the day, when the internet stops having content, that's where the internet loses effectiveness,” he added. 
On top of that risk, Lai said cyberattacks have become more “complex and sophisticated” and are likely to keep increasing, especially with the rise of AI.
He explained that attackers are now using bots and connected devices to exploit vulnerabilities in internet-linked systems, commonly known as IoT (Internet of Things) devices.
“It could be state-sponsored, it could be anything. It could be targeted at individual or targeted at companies. And we see that these attacks are getting more sophisticated,” he said. 
A Cloudflare study shows that data breaches and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have been on a growing trend in recent years. In fact, the Philippines experiences more data breaches than the Asia-Pacific average, Lai said. 
In 2024, 46% of Philippine firms reported data breaches, which was above the 40% Asia-Pacific average. Most raised concern over more sophisticated AI-driven attacks, saying that over a tenth of their IT budgets are spent on cybersecurity.
The country also logged nearly 21 million DDoS attacks in 2024, where servers are flooded with internet traffic until they slow down and crash.
“And this number, I can guarantee, is going to keep growing. … Because the Philippines, like a lot of other ASEAN countries, is subject to a lot of geopolitical challenges and all that,” Lai said. 
Cloudflare’s cloud access security broker (CASB), which offers various cybersecurity services, now gives firms a way to check the security risks of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini.
Simply put, organizations using Cloudflare One can scan integrated AI platforms and receive alerts for sensitive data shared in chats or prompts, compliance risks and potential misconfigurations.
Administrators can also see what data employees share on AI platforms and chats they have.
With attacks expected to grow, Lai said organizations must strengthen their systems and equip their people to fight back.
“So the awareness of these attacks need to be increased, the talent pool coming from the companies and from the government need to look into that and scale up,” he added.
To do this, Lai stressed, the government must partner with tech organizations and invest in initiatives that teach Filipinos how to protect their data and content online. 
“I think it's very important for government agencies to work closely with the tech organisations to combat this,” he said. “We, at Cloudflare, are more than happy to invest back to have education and to tell people how to avoid these kinds of scammers.”
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