I think the future is in curating trustworthy websites. A current popular strategy is to append `site:reddit.com` to guarantee human-generated answers. I don't search Google any more so much as searching Wikipedia or some topic-specific wiki or database.

AI is occasionally useful for answering questions, but I don't trust its output without fact-checking with an independent source. Even some of wikis are filling up with AI-generated junk, if the admins aren't dilligent.

Author seems to have a ton of hate for Cloudflare. Everything I read on that page I support.

No, search DOES NOT work well. When I search for things like product reviews, I receive affiliate spam and other nonsense. Niche topics also return no results in many cases. (I had this happen the other day, and Google's "AI" actually gave me the correct answer...I've always been an old fart who dislikes how AI is shoved down everyone's throat, but that moment was definitely magical for me.) As AI has exploded, search results have gotten worse, now also filled with AI generated nonsense.

Further, right now AI companies area already doing this, but they aren't paying. Cloudflare wants them to pay up for the content that they are stealing right now, for free.

They are one of the few that are in a place to be able to do this at capacity.

Cloudflare doesn't make ad dollars or anything else (to my knowledge at least, not with the products I use), they gain NOTHING (except possibly payment share or a monthly fee) by doing this for authors.