Starting September 15th, Cloudflare will block bots that scrape ad-supported websites for search indexing and AI training at the same time. The goal is to encourage AI companies to separate their crawlers for different purposes, giving publishers more control over which ones to allow into their websites. [Link: Cloudflare's new policy pushes AI companies to pay for publishers' content | TechCrunch | https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/01/cloudflares-new-policy-pushes-ai-companies-to-pay-for-publishers-content/ | TechCrunch]

For our second Content Independence Day, we’re giving website owners finer options to manage AI traffic. Instead of a one-size-fits-all block, all customers can now easily…

Some crawlers gather data for both search and AI training, so when publishers block them to protect content they risk disappearning from search results ...