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Cloudflare, a leading connectivity cloud provider, has unveiled a new marketplace and advanced tools designed to give publishers more power over website AI bots, reshaping how site owners manage AI-driven crawlers that scrape their content.
In an era where website AI bots from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are aggressively harvesting online content to train large language models—often without driving traffic back to the source—Cloudflare is stepping up with solutions tailored to protect publishers. The company’s latest offering allows website owners to easily automate their robots.txt file, restricting AI bots from accessing certain parts of their sites, especially pages monetized through ads.
A robots.txt file is a straightforward text document that instructs web crawlers on which sections of a website they can or cannot explore. Cloudflare’s new managed robots.txt feature streamlines this process, automatically creating or updating these files to clearly communicate with AI bots like Google-Extended and Applebot-Extended. This ensures that publishers’ preferences on whether their content can be used for AI training are explicitly stated—without compromising SEO or existing rules.
Data Shows Website AI Bots Aren’t Sending Fair Traffic Back
This push comes amid mounting frustration over website AI bots extracting massive amounts of content without fairly compensating or redirecting visitors to original publishers. According to Cloudflare’s data, OpenAI’s GPTBot made roughly 1,700 content requests for each referral click it generated. The situation is even starker with Anthropic’s ClaudeBot, which exhibited a staggering ratio of about 73,000 requests per referral.
Cloudflare’s new tools address these concerns head-on. By making the managed robots.txt feature the default for all new customers, the company is proactively helping site owners control how website AI bots interact with their data. Importantly, these tools preserve all prior crawling directives, remain SEO-friendly, and are simple enough for even non-technical users to deploy.
Both the automated robots.txt and enhanced crawler controls are available at no cost to all Cloudflare users. With this move, Cloudflare aims to rebalance the dynamics between publishers and AI companies, ensuring that website owners have a clear say in how their valuable content is treated by the growing wave of AI data harvesters.
