Your site, your rules: new AI traffic options for all customers
Cloudflare introduces new AI traffic controls for all customers, allowing website owners to block or manage AI scrapers and crawlers. The updates include options to allow, block, or rate-limit AI bots, as well as a new "AI Audit" tool to monitor AI traffic and negotiate usage terms.
Background
Cloudflare (founded 2009) is one of the world's largest cloud infrastructure and security companies, operating a global content delivery network (CDN) that sits between website visitors and the websites' servers. It protects and accelerates almost 20% of all websites. This blog post announces a change in policy: Cloudflare's previous default was to allow AI bots (such as those used by OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic to train large language models) to scrape content from its customers' websites unless a customer explicitly opted out. Now, for the first time, Cloudflare gives all customers a simple, free, one-click toggle to block all AI scrapers, plus a separate tool ("AI Audit") to monitor which AI bots are accessing their content. This matters because AI training data is increasingly contested—many website owners want to allow human visitors but block automated AI data collection, and the previous default ("allow unless you say no") put the burden on individual site owners. Cloudflare is positioning itself as an ally of content creators against unlicensed AI training.