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Search is how we find nearly everything on the web — creators, merchants, answers. AI is rewriting the rules, leaving creators caught between staying discoverable in an agentic era and getting paid for their work. Today we're launching two initiatives to help.
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 distinguish and manage Search, Agent, and Training bots, alongside the new ability to protect ad-monetized pages.
We're opening the waitlist for our Monetization Gateway, which will allow you to charge for any web page, dataset, API, or MCP tool behind Cloudflare. The charges will settle in stablecoins over the x402 open protocol, with no payments stack of your own to build.
Google's dual-purpose crawler creates an unfair AI advantage. To protect publishers and foster competition, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority must mandate crawler separation for search and AI.
The world is adopting anonymous credentials for digital privacy, but these systems are vulnerable to quantum computers. This post explores the cryptographic challenges and promising research paths toward building new, quantum-resistant credentials from the ground up.
Cloudflare is partnering with Visa and Mastercard to help secure the future of agentic commerce.
Rohin Lohe and Will Allen
We are proposing—as starting points—responsible AI bot principles that emphasize transparency, accountability, and respect for content access and use preferences.
How do we embrace the power of AI without losing control? That was one of our big themes for AI Week 2025. Check out all of the products, partnerships, and features we announced.
Cloudflare launches AI Crawl Control (formerly AI Audit) and introduces easily customizable 402 HTTP responses.
Cloudflare now lets websites and bot creators use Web Bot Auth to segment agents from verified bots, making it easier for customers to allow or disallow the many types of user and partner directed.
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.
It’s Content Independence Day: Cloudflare, along with a majority of the world's leading publishers and AI companies, is changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for content.
From May 2024 to May 2025, crawler traffic rose 18%, with GPTBot growing 305% and Googlebot 96%.
Pay per crawl is a new feature to allow content creators to charge AI crawlers for access to their content.
Bots can start authenticating to Cloudflare using public key cryptography, preventing them from being spoofed and allowing origins to have confidence in their identity.
Bots now browse like humans. We're proposing bots use cryptographic signatures so that website owners can verify their identity. Explanations and demonstration code can be found within the post.
How Cloudflare uses generative AI to slow down, confuse, and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and other bots that don’t respect “no crawl” directives.
Cloudflare observed a 4x increase in bot-related traffic on Black Friday in 2024. 29% of all traffic on our network on Black Friday was Grinch Bots wreaking holiday havoc.
