Shrenik Kothari, an analyst from Robert W. Baird, maintained the Hold rating on Cloudflare. The associated price target was raised to $148.00.
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Shrenik Kothari’s rating is based on Cloudflare’s recent strategic move to block AI crawlers by default, which positions the company as a defender of content creators and a gatekeeper of web infrastructure. This decision aligns with Cloudflare’s mission to reshape internet economics in the AI era, although it may not immediately impact the company’s revenue. The initiative is seen as a strategic positioning play that could lead to future monetization opportunities as AI companies may need to pay for access to high-quality data.
Cloudflare’s CEO highlighted the systemic risks posed by AI to the open web business model, with AI companies having high crawl-to-visitor ratios. The company’s actions aim to protect customer content and create economic leverage as AI models increasingly rely on real-time data. While this move is more about thought leadership in the near term, it could prompt media companies to switch to Cloudflare for web infrastructure protection, given the lack of alternatives offering similar AI-crawler controls.
According to TipRanks, Kothari is a top 100 analyst with an average return of 26.2% and a 75.21% success rate. Kothari covers the Technology sector, focusing on stocks such as Tenable Holdings, CyberArk Software, and Okta.