Cloudflare
An American internet infrastructure company that sits in front of a large share of the web, handling traffic, security and increasingly AI services.
Cloudflare is one of those companies most people have never chosen but use constantly. A large share of websites route their traffic through it, so it handles the caching that makes pages load fast, blocks attacks, and decides which automated visitors get through. If you have ever seen a “checking your browser” screen, that was Cloudflare.
That position in the middle of the web has made it an unexpected player in AI. It sells hosting for AI applications, it lets publishers block or charge AI crawlers that scrape their content, and in 2026 it started building payment infrastructure so AI agents can buy services directly. When a company sees most of the traffic, it gets to set a lot of the rules.