Last July, Cloudflare introduced an optional setting to allow website publishers to block A.I. scrapers if they wanted. That led to the default setting on Tuesday.

Now, that latter tool will be on by default. Matthew Prince, Cloudflare’s chief executive, told the New York Times that it was “changing the rules of the internet across all of Cloudflare”.

Major publishers have signed on or expressed support for Cloudflare's latest move to block AI bot crawlers by default, including Gannett, Time, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, and the Associated Press.

Content Creators, Want to Charge or Block AI Crawlers? Here’s Cloudflare’s Solution Your email has been sent Cloudflare’s new pay per crawl system, which also applies to site owners, is ...

Cloudflare (NYSE:NET) said it now the first Internet infrastructure provider to block AI crawlers accessing content without permission or compensation, by default. AI crawlers are automated bots ...

Cloudflare claims its clients can now allow or disallow crawling for each stage of the AI life cycle (in particular, training, fine-tuning, and inference) and white-list specific verified crawlers.

Web giant Cloudflare to block AI bots from scraping content by default By Ryan Browne, CNBC • Published July 1, 2025 • Updated on July 1, 2025 at 2:03 pm ...

Internet firm Cloudflare has started blocking AI web crawlers to prevent them from "accessing content without permission or compensation," by default according to an announcement on Tuesday.

Cloudflare will block AI crawlers from accessing web pages by default, while providing more granular options for site owners to control the type of AI bots to crawl their pages.