> 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.
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).
We had googlebot blast a random customer system and almost cause an outage, this is when I first learnt that google will use it for AI training also. It's honestly kind of frustrating also because you then search on it and theres (was) nothing on how you are meant to "correctly" tell google to fuck off, and not use it like that.
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.
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.
> 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).