Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers

ray_v

So, in summary: still the honors system. Got it. thanks.

graeme

Has there been any update on the pay per crawl program?

simonw

The big news here is that Googlebot will be blocked from September 15th onwards by one the "block training" policies, because Google use the same crawler infrastructure for their search index AND for training Gemini: > Another change that will apply on September 15 is that multi-purpose crawlers (specifically those that combine Search with Training) will be allowed/blocked according to all of their behaviors, in line with our call for transparency for website owners. Since the defaults will be enforced by the most restrictive applicable rules, multi-purpose crawlers such as Googlebot, Applebot, and BingBot will be blocked by customers who have selected to block Training (either through the new options to manage AI traffic, or through the legacy Block AI bots service).

tekacs

> For all new domains onboarding to Cloudflare, the categories of Training and Agent will be blocked by default on the pages that display ads, while Search will remain allowed by default. It's kind of exhausting seeing Cloudflare playing both sides of the arms race. I just can't imagine bringing myself to use their technology to build agents and build AI products when they're also doing things like this. > This also lines up the incentive model we want to foster. Losing trusted status across the more than 20% of web domains that sit behind Cloudflare is a deterrent with teeth. Trust becomes something you can carry with you, and something you can lose. And even more so, LLM language aside, fun and fascinating to see them flagrantly calling out their position here as if it's a positive.

zzzeek

this is annoying, it makes a big deal about "Back when we announced pay-per-crawl"... I want pay-per-crawl. I clicked the link for it a year ago, got presented with a "request access" button, I "requested access" and obviously since I'm nobody I heard absolutely nothing. Now they're touting the link again, I checked, still that same "request access" button. I have no idea if anyone even has access to this feature. I don't care about all this other stuff, I want the AI crawlers to pay me cash. Because boy do those fuckers want to crawl me. I'll gladly double the size of my gerrit/jenkins servers to keep up with the load if these stupid bots want to pay to crawl every jenkins build artifact and every changeset source file on the server, as they really seem to want to do.

arjie

This is fine so long as it’s easy for me to turn off. I just don’t want to accidentally lose all AI traffic one day.

fc417fc802

Please consider installing one of the many PoW schemes such as anubis rather than use these cloudflare "features". I increasingly encounter outright blocks rather than any sort of captcha when visiting cloudflare "protected" sites. Each individual site isn't particularly important to me but it's depressing to watch the process unfold like this. You really are choosing to erode the core basis of the internet if you go this route.

holografix

What’s the end goal for Cloudflare and the web here? I don’t think ADOG (anthropic, deepmind, openai, google) is going to pay to crawl. What would force their hand? It’s more likely they’ll strike undisclosed agreements with major sources of discussion like reddit etc. That’s not to say getting new information as a way of context-providing is not going to happen but that’s not scraping.

Fizz43

>So, instead of defining a bot primarily as “AI” or not, our updated approach to classification will ask deeper questions about bot or agent behavior: What are they doing on my site? What are they storing? And how will they reshare my content? I dont get this. The question is are they a bot or a human. It doesnt matter what they are doing I dont want bots on my site.

sneak

Website operators don’t lose anything when people download the content from their website and use it. There is no technical mechanism whereby it is actually possible to allow people to read your webpage and not use it for other things. You can’t give responses that say “this is ok for indexing but not for training”. Anyone trying to sell you this sort of technology is lying.

noduerme

I wonder if this has anything to do with the cf bug that stripped all POST data from requests to a SPA I manage for 4-5 hours last week. That was a real good time, figuring out that it wasn't trying to show challenges or anything. Default setting for any web app protection from cloudflare should always be "off" unless you're under attack, and then who knows what settings will or won't break your configuration.