Cloudflare saw revenues rise for the third quarter of 2025, with ever-increasing demand for AI services paired with quantum-enthused security considerations driving growth.

The vendor reported $562 million in Q3 revenues, which was a 31% year-over-year increase, while gross profits surged 74% year over year to $415.7 million.

CEO Matthew Prince told investors that AI was becoming a “decisive factor” in helping the vendor win multimillion dollar contracts, including a deal it secured in 2023 that it had initially lost to a rival in 2016.

Among the notable wins of late was a $1.2 million contract from an unnamed web infrastructure platform to help with AI crawl control and bot management. According to Prince, the partner was experiencing a massive surge in AI scrapers and bots hitting their origin servers, which impacted legitimate traffic.

Cloudflare has been aggressive in their stance against AI bots, culminating in a frank exchange of words with Perplexity, which saw Prince liken the AI search app’s crawling habits to that of “North Korean hackers.”

In a bid to monetize the influx of AI traffic, Cloudflare is looking to implement a pay-per-crawl feature, in which partner firms would be able to charge a fee every time an AI crawler accesses a page in their Cloudflare zone.

Prince told investors the pay-per-crawl could “transform Cloudflare from a vendor they pay for services into a powerful revenue generator for their business.”

“Businesses of all shapes will be transformed by the rise of AI,” Prince said. “I don't think people yet appreciate how AI is another massive information consumption platform shift.

“Just as we moved from consuming information via a browser on a desktop to social media, then to apps on mobile devices, AI is another information consumption platform shift. It changes where and how we will consume and interact with information.”

A sprinkle of quantum

Beyond building the backbone for the AI hypecycle, another next-generation technology was top of line during Cloudflare’s Q3 earnings call: quantum.

The vendor has been making strides of late to streamline quantum security for the web, with a big-name partnership with Google unveiled only last week, looking at tackling post-quantum cryptography (PQC).

Prince told investors of his “mixed feelings” regarding quantum – quashing the apocalyptic views of some to instead offer a more practical viewpoint.

“I think quantum changes some interesting things,” Prince said. “I think it's likely that you'll have more efficient package delivery, that you'll be less likely to be delayed on your flight. It will cause problems for some of the older generations of cryptography. But that's a very solvable problem.”

For Cloudflare, the CEO said quantum has the scale to figure out what the right solution for the nascent technology is.

“We have rolled [PQC] out across our entire network for every customer, whether they pay us or not, because we believe that everybody should have the foundational levels of the best of security at no cost,” Prince said. “The reason it's important to do now, even if we don't think that there are going to be quantum computers that can factor giant numbers, which is what you need to do in order for it to affect cryptography, is the risk of storing the data.”

Prince was outlining to investors the concept of “Q-Day” – a point in the future where a quantum computer will become powerful enough to break encryptions. Several threat-actor groups have begun preparing for that eventuality via "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks, something Cloudflare wants to prevent through its PQC additions.

Prince said: “If you just hoovered up a bunch of internet data and then held on to it, you could in the future replay that and decrypt it," Prince said. "But for some of our customers, including the U.S. government, a cabinet-level public agency that we did a renewal with, this is incredibly important.

“What we can do in partnership with organizations like Google is actually roll out real-world tests and prove that it's possible and cost-effective to do it. … I do think forward-leaning is the right thing. And I think it is an example of how Cloudflare is always trying to live up to our mission of helping build a better internet."

Desai departs for MongoDB

In addition to reporting financials, Cloudflare announced that Chirantan “CJ” Desai will be leaving the company.

Desai, who joined the firm from ServiceNow, is set to depart Cloudflare to take the CEO role at MongoDB effective November 10. Desai will replace Dev Ittycheria, who has led the firm for more than a decade, but will remain on the board and serve as an advisor to Desai before ultimately retiring from a full-time operating role.

Prince said of Desai: “I appreciate how you brought a customer-first focus to Cloudflare's already powerful innovation engine. … You're our second product leader in a row to be recruited away to be CEO somewhere awesome. I have no doubt you'll bring some of Cloudflare's relentless culture of innovation to them.”