Cloudflare might have just killed the web search functionality of AI chatbots.
The company announced that it would start blocking AI crawlers by default, drawing a line in the open web where content is no longer a free fuel for AI. If AI companies want in, they will have to pay up.
The announcement reframes the foundational deal that powered the web for decades. For years, websites gave Google content, and in return, Google sent them traffic. Now, generative AI is severing that loop with GEO — copying without clicks, quoting without proper credit, and more.
Cloudflare, which routes traffic for 20% of the internet (as the company claims), says it is time for publishers and AI companies to work together to reward the content that it deserves, and improve the economy of the web.
This move won’t halt AI, but it might slow its free lunch. And that’s precisely the point.
The Company Calls it ‘Content Independence Day’
“AI-driven web doesn’t reward content creators the way that the old search-driven web did,” reads the blog post, arguing that the exchange of traffic-for-content no longer holds in a world where tools like ChatGPT and Claude scrape text to generate answers with no attribution or reward.
“With OpenAI, it’s 750 times harder to get traffic than it was with the Google of old. With Anthropic, it’s 30,000 times harder.”
That isn’t a gentle drop-off, it’s a cliff. And content creators are falling off it.
Cloudflare’s new policy flips the default, from passive permission to active protection. Every new domain signing up with the service now gets asked whether they want to allow AI crawlers.
The default is “no”. Companies like Gannett Media, Condé Nast, Quora, Ziff Davis, and Reddit are backing the initiative, aiming to restore value that AI has quietly eroded.
This could also address the trouble caused by AI crawlers. Bots from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta are increasingly burdening independent websites by consuming excessive bandwidth and disregarding protocols like robots.txt, resulting in higher bills and degraded server performance.
A Slowdown, Not a Stop
Developers like Gergely Orosz on LinkedIn and X also have raised concerns over this aggressive scraping, with some building tools like Anubis to fight back.
Cloudflare seems to be adamant on what it wants to do. The company earlier reported that AI bots now account for more than 50 billion daily requests and have responded with deflection tools, such as AI Labyrinth, to waste bot resources.
“If the Internet is going to survive the age of AI, we need to give publishers the control they deserve and build a new economic model that works for everyone – creators, consumers, tomorrow’s AI founders, and the future of the web itself,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.
He added that the goal of Cloudflare is to put the power back in the hands of creators, while still helping AI companies innovate. “This is about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant Internet with a new model that works for everyone,” he added.
Even Reddit agrees. “AI companies, search engines, researchers, and anyone else crawling sites have to be who they say they are. And any platform on the web should have a say in who is taking their content for what,” said Steve Huffman, co-founder and CEO of Reddit.
“The whole ecosystem of creators, platforms, web users and crawlers will be better when crawling is more transparent and controlled, and Cloudflare’s efforts are a step in the right direction for everyone.”
While web search features in AI tools offer utility, there is a growing consensus that crawler behaviour must be regulated to protect smaller web operators. Considering this, it looks like Cloudflare’s new measures can be a necessary feature for the web.
An Open Web With Closed Gates?
The real significance of Cloudflare’s move isn’t just the block, it’s the framework it hopes to build next. The company plans to work on a marketplace where the value of content is judged not by page views, but by how much it adds value in terms of knowledge. It’s a step toward rewarding originality, not clickbait.
Cloudflare is also working on protocols to help AI crawlers identify themselves, allowing publishers to make nuanced decisions, which could permit AI for search, but not for training. Until now, content scraping has been largely unregulated, masked behind generic user agents and vague intentions.
Still, the policy opens up a paradox. AI companies are invited to work with Cloudflare, provided they compensate. This puts the company in a powerful position, which could be beneficial for publishers using Cloudflare, and in a way, could also be controversial for AI companies.
Publishers may celebrate the move, but AI developers may see it as a speed bump to innovation. For an industry built on large-scale web scraping, “permission” could become the new latency.
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