Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients’ websites

MIT Technology Review - AI
Jul 1, 2025 10:00
Peter Hall
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airesearchtechnology

Summary

Cloudflare has announced it will now automatically block AI bots from crawling websites it hosts, though clients can choose to allow or ban specific bots. The company is also introducing a "pay-per-crawl" service, enabling website owners to receive compensation from AI companies that wish to access their content. This move could significantly impact how AI models gather training data and may lead to new norms around data access and compensation in the AI field.

The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare announced today that it will now default to blocking AI bots from visiting websites it hosts. Cloudflare will also give clients the ability to manually allow or ban these AI bots on a case-by-case basis, and it will introduce a so-called “pay-per-crawl” service that clients can use to receive compensation…

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