Cloudfare stops AI scrapers
July 1, 2025
Cloudflare, the tech company that secures sites and manages their traffic, has rolled out a new permission-based setting that allows owners to automatically block AI companies from collecting their digital data.
With the new setting, websites can block — by default — online bots that scrape their data, requiring the website owner to grant access for a bot to collect the content. Previously if Cloudflare did not flag as a hacker or malicious actor any bot could get through to a website to gather its information.
“We’re changing the rules of the internet across all of Cloudflare,” said Matthew Prince, the chief executive. “If you’re a robot, now you have to go on the toll road in order to get the content of all of these publishers.”
Cloudflare is making the change to protect original content on the internet, Prince said. If AI companies freely use data from various websites without permission or payment, people will be discouraged from creating new digital content, he added. The company, which says its network of servers handles about 20 percent of internet traffic, has seen a sharp increase in AI data crawlers on the web.
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