AI wants it all — but publishers are pushing back

In partnership with

Try inFlow Free—$499 Off for a Limited Time

Get started for free and see how simple inventory management can be.

inFlow helps you stay on top of inventory, track costs with precision, and protect your bottom line.

You’ll always know how much you’re spending, what you’re making, and where you can save.

It also simplifies inventory, orders, shipping, and barcode scanning in one easy-to-use system—rated “easy to use” by 93% of users.

Rated 4.6 stars across 500+ reviews on Capterra and named a top pick in multiple competitive comparisons

inFlow connects with Shopify, Amazon, QuickBooks, UPS, and 90+ other tools, so everything works together without the manual work.

Try it free and, for a limited time, save $499 when you upgrade with code EASY499.

An inFlow specialist can show you how to simplify inventory from day one

✅ See how others are navigating change in our case studies
🚀 Compare plans on our pricing page

Save $499—Start Free

Franc Talking – Weekly Round-up, 6 July 2025

Welcome

Hello and welcome to all new Franc Talking subscribers. Great to have you here.

This is your weekly dose of business, marketing and tech updates. Let’s jump into it!

The big story this week: Cloudflare has launched a pay-per-crawl product aimed at protecting content creators from the growing threat of AI scraping their work without permission.

Elsewhere in marketing and tech this week:

• Google began rolling out its June 2025 core update, which has a seismic impact on search rankings—extending to AIOs (Google's AI Search product embedded within traditional search results).

• Similarweb published a Generative AI report highlighting a surge in AI-driven prompts and searches for news terms—while organic traffic to publishers continues to decline.

• Finally, a new study from Search Engine Journal confirms what many of us have seen firsthand: AI Overviews (AIOs) and Google’s AI Mode can deliver wildly different results across sessions. That volatility reflects how LLMs dynamically construct answers from probabilistic models—meaning consistency isn't guaranteed, even with identical prompts.

Enjoying this week’s edition? You can now read it in our refreshed web format, powered by Beehiiv. And if you're thinking about launching your own newsletter, I’ve also set up a Franc Talking partner link — a great place to start.

Andy

P.S — If you do read this newsletter regularly and watch the videos I produce, please do take 30 seconds (honestly, it’s super quick!) to fill out my audience survey here.

📖 What I have been reading this week in business, marketing & tech

👆 Tap-worthy reads from this week.

Cloudflare vs the crawlers

Cloudflare takes aim at AI crawlers with new pay-per-crawl model

Cloudflare declares war on AI crawlers

On 1 July, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince marked what he called Content Independence Day. The central message? You now have a choice. You get to decide. No AI crawl without compensation.

With GPTBot, Meta’s External Agent, and others rapidly crawling the open web to fuel their language models, Cloudflare has stepped in to defend the value exchange that underpins online publishing. It's a timely move. For years, bots indexed content, search engines sent traffic, and publishers monetised that traffic. But LLMs have broken this loop—answering questions directly without attribution, traffic, or revenue.

Enter Cloudflare’s proposed solution: pay-per-crawl. Still in private beta, it builds on existing HTTP status codes and authentication protocols to give site owners three options: allow free access, require payment, or block crawlers entirely.

It’s a bold attempt to reset the rules. On one hand, it protects content creators from having their IP mined for free. On the other, blocking access could mean missing out on brand visibility inside AI-generated answers—where customers increasingly turn for information. It’s a tension every publisher will need to weigh.

Alongside the announcement, Cloudflare published fascinating data showing how dramatically the crawler landscape has shifted over the past year:

GPTBot surged from 5% to 30% of all crawl share
Meta’s External Agent entered strong with 19%
ByteSpider (likely TikTok/ByteDance) dropped from 42% to 7%
Googlebot increased its crawl activity by 96%

Cloudflare Radar shows GPTBot dominated AI crawler traffic in May 2025, accounting for 30% of requests, followed by ClaudeBot (21%), Meta-ExternalAgent (19%), and Amazonbot (11%).

The direction of travel is clear, there’s a land grab happening. Everyone is racing to scrape and train before the rules change.

With an estimated 20% of the web running through Cloudflare, this isn’t just rhetoric—it’s leverage. This initiative isn’t just about slowing AI bots. It’s about forcing a new deal: one where value flows both ways.

Whether others follow—or whether AI giants find a workaround—remains to be seen. But Cloudflare has made its position clear: if you want the data, you’re going to have to pay.

🎯 Hey content creator!

Thinking about launching your own newsletter? I recommend Beehiiv — it’s built for creators, with all the tools you need to grow:

✏️ Beautiful templates

🚀 Powerful growth features

📈 Built-in analytics

💸 Monetisation tools

All in one place, no fuss.

🐝 Try Beehiiv with my link

(You'll help support me if you sign up via this link 💙)

AI vs the news

Similarweb: Generative AI disrupts traditional news distribution

Similarweb's report shows dramatic change to how users discover news through AI search

Similarweb dropped a timely and important report this week on the impact of generative AI on news publishers — and the headline numbers are stark.

Chart showing ChatGPT web unique visitors and app monthly active users from Jan 2023 to May 2025, with 52% web growth and 116% app growth over the last six months

Between January 2024 and May 2025, news-related prompts in ChatGPT surged by 212%, while equivalent searches on Google News declined by 5%. In other words: users are increasingly turning to AI chat tools for real-time news updates — and skipping the clicks entirely.

This shift to zero-click behaviour — where users get what they need from the AI response and never visit a source — is reshaping how news is accessed and distributed. Publishers are seeing organic traffic drop off a cliff, especially since the rollout of Google’s AI Overviews in 2024.

ChatGPT’s user base continues to grow too. Similarweb notes app users have more than doubled year-on-year, while web traffic has climbed by 52%. But voice usage — which is harder to measure — is something that I use for 50% of my engagement with ChatGPT, further deepening the engagement loop.

Publishers who once relied on Google News or Top Stories now face a fundamental rethink. Distribution needs to diversify: podcasts, newsletters, TikTok, live events — anywhere users can build a direct relationship outside of the search box or AI prompt.

News-related prompts in ChatGPT surged by 212% between January 2024 and May 2025, while equivalent searches on Google declined by 5%.

The report also highlights ChatGPT’s growing role in referral traffic. Referrals from ChatGPT to publisher sites have grown 25x — but that isn’t enough to offset the traffic lost from traditional search. Reuters, NY Post, and Business Insider are among the biggest recipients. Reuters, in particular, is frequently cited in financial prompt chains — it regularly appears in ChatGPT’s query fan-out layer, surfacing as a go-to source when the model seeks deeper context on business and finance.

Politically, the data sparks fresh questions too. Politics is now the fastest-growing category in ChatGPT prompts. As LLMs become a key source of political information, expect louder debates around bias, hallucination, and source trust. Something tell me, we've been here before.

The key chart in the report shows the steep drop in organic news traffic, mirroring the rise of AI-generated answers and zero-click search. It’s the clearest signal yet that the traditional content-discovery model is collapsing. Publishers now face a choice: adapt their strategy or risk being left out of the answer entirely.