Skip to content
TopicTracker
From HackerNewsView original
TranslationTranslation

Your Site, Your Rules

Cloudflare launches a new suite of tools giving website owners more control over how AI crawlers and scrapers access their content, including AI Audit dashboards, one-click blocking options, and support for robots.txt and AI-specific directives.

Background

- Cloudflare is a major internet infrastructure company that provides content delivery, DDoS protection, and website security services. It sits between a website's origin server and its visitors. - The article announces a new Cloudflare feature that lets website owners block AI crawlers (such as those used by OpenAI, Google, or other companies to train large language models) from scraping their content. - "AI crawlers" are automated bots that systematically download text, images, and other data from websites to use as training material for AI models. Many website owners object to this use of their content without permission or payment. - This is part of a broader debate: AI companies argue web scraping is fair use of publicly available data; content creators and publishers argue it is unauthorized use of their intellectual property. Cloudflare is giving site owners a technical tool to enforce their preference without needing legal action.

Related stories