IT Home News on April 13, reported by Business Insider today, the latest data released by Cloudflare reveals a key reality: AI companies are “consuming” the internet on a large scale, but the feedback is very limited.

Cloudflare provides infrastructure for about 20% of the internet and continues to monitor the frequency of AI crawlers fetching web pages and how these platforms bring traffic back to websites through referrals. The “fetch to referral ratio” has become the core metric for measuring this relationship, essentially reflecting the gap between acquisition and feedback.

The data gap in early April 2026 is extremely obvious. Anthropic lags far behind with a ratio of 8800 to 1, meaning that for every 8800 fetches, there is only 1 visit return.

OpenAI has a ratio of 993 to 1, the gap is also apparent. In contrast, Microsoft, Google, and DuckDuckGo perform closer to traditional internet models.

The number of fetch requests corresponding to each referral visit is as follows (IT Home note: the data represents web activity from April 1 to April 7, 2026, excluding native applications).

• Anthropic: 8800

• OpenAI: 993.3

• Perplexity: 152.9

• Microsoft: 30.4

• Google: 5.6

• DuckDuckGo: 1.5

Anthropic's performance is particularly noteworthy, as it has long been renowned for its image as a "more ethical" AI company, and has thus gained favor with some users. However, this set of data reveals another layer of “ethical issue” — how AI companies treat the internet ecology that provides them with training and information sources.

The traditional internet is built on an implicit exchange relationship: websites allow search engines to fetch content for free in exchange for traffic that can be converted into revenue. However, generative AI is breaking this mechanism. Chatbots provide answers directly, eliminating the need for users to click on the original web pages.

The result of this change is that the value acquired by platforms far exceeds the feedback, and in some cases, high-frequency crawling behavior can even increase website operating costs.

Anthropic has questioned Cloudflare's statistical methods and stated that as new features are launched, referral traffic is increasing. However, the overall trend is already very clear and difficult to overlook.

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