You might have come across the company Cloudflare if you run a website. If not, you need to know it’s one of those behemoth tech companies that make the internet tick. And one of its services is ensuring that visitors to any website are human; you’ll have seen it in action – click the squares with traffic lights to prove you are not a robot.

Anyway, what does Cloudflare have to do with racing? Well, it recently announced that it was launching a platform, essentially a marketplace, where website owners could sell access to their platforms to bots and web crawlers for AI training. Experts predict that these data markets could lead to a gold rush, potentially leading to new revenue streams for those who hold and publish data, including horse racing data.

To clarify why this is important for different aspects of the industry, ranging from horse betting to equine welfare, let us first explain what the problem is and what this service, and others which will surely pop up, will do to fix it.

AI needs good data to work with

Artificial intelligence is changing the game in many industries. However, AI is not a brain in the human sense, nor can it think or reason like us. What it does well is analyse data. Most of that data is kept on the internet, and the AI needs to crawl the internet to find the answers or be previously trained on the required data.

For example, if I asked ChatGPT who won the 4.35 at Ludlow yesterday, it would search the internet, perhaps visiting the results page here at ludlowracecourse.co.uk, and retrieve that answer. It may also look at other websites, such as the Racing Post or Sporting Life.

Now, you can appreciate how asking ChatGPT or another bot for that information means that traffic to websites, including this one, might be negatively impacted. That means less advertising revenue and, eventually, less impetus to employ people to publish that data. Why should the Racing Post painstakingly catalogue racing results if a bot is going to snatch them for free? You get the idea.

Racing data providers could benefit

Of course, none of this is unknown to big data holders. Some have employed services that block AI web crawlers from accessing their data. The only problem is that it is pretty challenging to do effectively. Companies like Cloudflare have some tricks up their sleeves, yet the vital thing to know is that web crawlers often ignore the protocols to stop them. It’s a massive issue outside of racing. The New York Times, for example, is suing AI companies for “billions” as it accuses those companies of profiting from its data (its articles) without permission.

Thus, Cloudflare believes its marketplace offers a solution. Initially, it will likely be big data holders – Timeform, BloodHorse, etc. – that can profit, but there is no reason why smaller website holders can’t get in on it too. All data is valuable to AI, especially if the tech companies want to provide their bots with the context needed to reach the desired goal of “superintelligence.” The point is that for an AI to understand fully, a niche little blog on the history of the Skelton Family is just as valuable to AI as a vast data set covering every historical result of the Cheltenham Festival.

Of course, we should also be sceptical. Not every AI company will want to pay for data, nor is it guaranteed that the remittance will be worth it. Yet, some experts believe the upshot could be a revenue stream comparable to online advertising. This could mean more incentives for publishing better data. It could be a net positive for bettors and anyone involved in the racing industry. Nothing’s guaranteed, but the idea seems like a good one.