Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers

One year ago, we declared the first Content Independence Day, and we gave website owners the means to take back control of their content. The deal between crawlers and website owners that had held up for 30 years — we crawl you, and you get referrals — was no longer true. AI was taking everything and sending back nothing, presenting an existential threat to website owners. And so we launched a one-click "Block AI Bots" option, along with a Pay-Per-Crawl marketplace.

A lot has changed in a year. Last July, conversations around "AI bots" centered around blocking AI training without compensation, pointing to the win-lose deal where content was used for model training with no value driven back to the website owner. But a desire for more nuance has emerged: Content owners still want to be able to protect their content, and they should be compensated for the original content that they work hard to create, curate, and share. We also know that locking down content isn't a one-size-fits-all solution; website owners want more options than resorting to "block all automation, every time."

If you run a small site, the problem isn't just that someone could train models on your content — it's that nobody can find you in the first place. So you have to make a Faustian bargain: either show up in search and let AI train on you, or risk losing discoverability. This unfairly advantages incumbent search providers if they use the same bots for both search and training; and this unfair advantage incentivizes new players to be evasive as they try to close the competitive gap.

Now, AI can be anything

Today, AI can be in anything. Google search has changed from being sorted by AI to being a full answer engine that answers your question directly on the results page. And Google is not unique in this position — this is the direction in which "search" is moving.

We could debate the cutoff for what qualifies as "AI" today, just to find that the standard changes tomorrow. 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?

A pragmatic taxonomy

To address these questions, we need a more nuanced view — a pragmatic taxonomy that aligns with the AI use cases our customers care about. So we are opening the discussion beyond AI training alone and focusing on three AI use cases that we want all customers to be able to manage:

• Search: any behavior that collects or indexes your content, so it can answer questions about it later. The key is that Search is proactively building a database of your site to later respond to queries with. Site owners should expect to get referral traffic or other equitable compensation as a result.
• Agent: automated behavior that is acting, usually in real time, on a person's behalf, to get something done right now. This includes chat fetch bots (e.g., ChatGPT-User) and browser-use agents (e.g., Gemini or Claude driving Chrome). The key is that it visits your web application in order to complete a job, and often there's a human waiting on the other end.
• Training: a crawler taking your content to train or fine-tune a model. The key is that your data is permanently absorbed into the underlying architecture of the AI to improve its capabilities.

Many popular crawlers on the web fall into one of the classifications above; some fall into multiple. We classify plenty of other behaviors beyond the three above — including ads verification, feed fetching, and agentic transactions. But we believe it should be simple for all website owners to manage access for these three AI-centered use cases. We believe that bot operators should separate their crawlers because that creates more transparency for website owners: allowing them to better understand why a given crawler is visiting them, as well as to better manage the access they extend to that crawler. If a company runs automation that builds Search indexes, acts as an Agent, and collects data to Train their models, then we strongly encourage that company to separate the automation into three separate crawlers.

We want a classification system that is scalable and representative of the world of automated traffic as it evolves. Tracking a bot's purposes is nothing new, but our new taxonomy involves a few updates that better represent the state of bot traffic today. Most notably, we want to recognize that bots that have multiple purposes should be tracked with all purposes, not just one of them.

New options to manage AI traffic

We want to provide more options for managing different kinds of AI traffic, to all website owners on the Cloudflare network.

Not all AI use is the same, and we want our customers to have the controls they need. So, we're launching the ability to manage AI traffic based on three major use cases: Search, Agent, and Training crawlers. With these new options, our customers can more finely tune how they manage AI bot traffic — including customers on our Free tier.

Setting new defaults

On September 15, 2026, we'll be setting new defaults for each of these three classifications. 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.

An ad is a signal that a website owner meant for a person to land there and see it — something monetizable that fuels the business. So, on those pages, we treat human attention as the end goal, and keep away the bots that may prevent this attention (i.e., Training and Agent bots). On the other hand, Search is the behavior that most naturally funnels back visitors, and we believe it's in the interest of most site owners to allow this.

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.

Of course, customer choice is paramount: if a website owner wants to opt out of these new default configurations, they can easily mark this in their Security settings any time leading up to September 15.

BotBase: a new visibility plane for Enterprise customers

We're also excited to launch a major visibility update as a new feature of Enterprise Bot Management.

Introducing BotBase. BotBase is our new database tracking all known bots, including Verified bots and agents. This database provides a comprehensive, searchable view of our entire directory of bots, directly on the Cloudflare dashboard.