Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince has now started a debate in the AI industry with his latest claim that Google enjoys a massive advantage over rivals like OpenAI and Microsoft, all thanks to its privileged access to web data. Speaking on the latest episode of TBPN podcast with John Coogan and Jodi Hays, Prince regaled that Googlebot the web crawler of the company sees 3.2 times more web pages as compared to OpenAI. He further added that Google has 4.8 times more access than Microsoft, while Anthropic operates at similar levels to Microsoft, with other AI firms trailing behind. “For every one page that OpenAI sees, Google is seeing 3.2 pages,” Prince said, underscoring the scale of Google’s reach.
Search dominance enables privileged access
Prince attributed this advantage of Google to its long-standing dominance in search, which has led website to grant Googlebot special permissions behind paywalls and restricted sections of the internet. He pointed to robots.txt files as evidence that Google maintains access to areas competitors cannot reach. “Everyone has let them behind their paywall. Everyone has let them see parts of the internet that no one else sees,” he noted.Prince further added that in the race to build the most powerful AI systems, data volumes and quality matter more than chips or personnel. He also argued that Alphabet’s Gemini model continues to outperform competitors mainly because of Google’s superior data access.“Whoever has the most data wins in the era of AI,” Prince said, suggesting regulators may need to either limit Google’s leverage or grant competitors equal access to level the playing field.
Google is crushing with Gemini 3
Google’s Gemini 3 has once again emerged as a formidable rival of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. The Google chatbot has managed to deliver superior results across reasoning, coding and multimodal benchmarking. As per industry analysts, Gemini 3 has consistently outperformed ChatGPT in MMLU reasoning tasks, programming accuracy and multimodal comprehension, making Google has the new leader in the AI model performance. The numbers clearly highlight this shift. According to data by Similarweb, ChatGPT’s seven‑day average visitors fell by about 22% over six weeks, dropping from nearly 203 million to 158 million. During the same period, Gemini’s traffic surged, with 28% month‑over‑month growth in December 2025. Gemini now commands close to 40% of ChatGPT’s web audience size, a remarkable feat given its recent launch. While ChatGPT still leads in absolute traffic, the downward trend is alarming for OpenAI.
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