Cloudflare doesn't need AI to survive as a business. There are more than enough DDoS attacks to protect from.

Yet it wasn't until AI grifters started aggressively scraping everything that sites started turning to CloudFlare (and the like) en masse.

Don’t forget that the main issue isn’t the initial data scrape but rather the fact that prompting an llm agent like claude code can amplify into 10 requests as it tries to answer your question.

Cloudflare was huge before AI bots became a problem.

Neither Cloudflare nor their competitors were aywhere near as prevalent before the AI bots. Farnell and Renesas outright blocked me, DigiKey makes me sit through their bullshit at nearly every request, issue trackers have the slowdown widgets etc. etc. etc. As late as early this year I never had these problems.