Patreon announced a partnership with Cloudflare to deploy Crawl Control technology, which blocks known AI training crawlers while still letting legitimate search and discovery bots through.
The feature is already live.
How the bot blocking actually works
Cloudflare’s Crawl Control distinguishes between bots that help creators get discovered, like search engine crawlers, and bots designed to train AI models without permission. The latter get turned away at the door.
Patreon CEO Jack Conte and SVP of Product Drew Rowny framed the move as fundamentally about creator consent and compensation.
