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Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers

Cloudflare, a tech company that helps websites secure and manage their internet traffic, said on Tuesday that it had rolled out a new permission-based setting that allows customers to automatically block artificial intelligence companies from collecting their digital data, a move that has implications for publishers and the race to build A.I. With Cloudflare’s new setting, websites can block — by default — online bots that scrape their data, requiring the website owner to grant access for a bot

Cloudflare just changed the internet, and it's bad news for the AI giants

iStock / Getty Images Plus The major internet Content Delivery Network (CDN), Cloudflare, has declared war on AI companies. Starting July 1, Cloudflare now blocks by default AI web crawlers accessing content from your websites without permission or compensation. The change addresses a real problem. My own small site, where I track all my stories, Practical Technology, has been slowed dramatically at times by AI crawlers. It's not just me. Numerous website owners have reported that AI crawlers,

Cloudflare declares war on AI crawlers - and the stakes couldn't be higher

D-Keine/Getty The major Internet Content Delivery Network (CDN), Cloudflare, has declared war on AI companies. Starting July 1, Cloudflare now blocks by default AI web crawlers accessing content from your websites without permission or compensation. The change addresses a real problem. My own small site, where I track all my stories, Practical Technology, has been slowed dramatically at times by AI crawlers. It's not just me. Numerous website owners have reported that AI crawlers, such as Open

Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker

Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker 45 minutes ago Share Save Chris Vallance Senior Technology Reporter Share Save Getty Images Millions of websites - including Sky News, The Associated Press and Buzzfeed - will now be able to block artificial intelligence (AI) bots from accessing their content without permission. The new system is being rolled out by internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare, which hosts around a fifth of the internet. Eventually, sites will be able to

Cloudflare experiment will block AI bot scrapers unless they pay a fee

Cloudflare has rolled out a couple of new measures meant to keep AI bot crawlers at bay. To start with, every new domain customer that signs up with the company to manage their website traffic will now be asked if they want to allow AI crawlers or to block them altogether. The company released a free tool in 2024 to block AI bots, but with this change, users can block them by default without having to tinker with their settings. Several big publishers, including Condé Nast, TIME and The Associat

Web giant Cloudflare to block AI bots from scraping content by default

In this article NET Follow your favorite stocks CREATE FREE ACCOUNT Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images Internet firm Cloudflare will start blocking artificial intelligence crawlers from accessing content without website owners' permission or compensation by default, in a move that could significantly impact AI developers' ability to train their models. Starting Tuesday, every new web domain that signs up to Cloudflare will be asked if they want to allow AI crawlers, effectively giving them

Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients’ websites

However, such systems don’t provide the same opportunities for monetization and credit as search engines historically have. AI models draw from a great deal of data on the web to generate their outputs, but these data sources are often not credited, limiting the creators’ ability to make money from their work. Search engines that feature AI-generated answers may include links to original sources, but they may also reduce people’s interest in clicking through to other sites and could even usher i

Pay up or stop scraping: Cloudflare program charges bots for each crawl

Cloudflare is now experimenting with tools that will allow content creators to charge a fee to AI crawlers to scrape their websites. In a blog Tuesday, Cloudflare explained that its "pay-per-crawl" feature is currently in a private beta. A small number of publishers—including AdWeek, The Associated Press, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Fortune, Gannett, and Ars Technica owner Condé Nast—will participate in the experiment. Each publisher will be able to set their own prices that bots must pay before sc

Cloudflare Is Blocking AI Crawlers by Default

Last year, internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare launched tools enabling its customers to block AI scrapers. Today the company has taken its fight against permissionless scraping several steps further. It has switched to blocking AI crawlers by default for its customers and is moving forward with a Pay Per Crawl program that lets customers charge AI companies to scrape their websites. Web crawlers have trawled the internet for information for decades. Without them, people would lose vitally i

Cloudflare will now block AI crawlers by default

The major internet architecture provider Cloudflare will now block known AI web crawlers by default to prevent them from “accessing content without permission or compensation,” according to an announcement on Tuesday. With the change, Cloudflare will start asking new domain owners whether they want to allow AI scrapers, and will even let some publishers implement a “Pay Per Crawl” fee. The Pay Per Crawl program will let publishers set a price for AI scrapers to access their content. AI companie

Cloudflare launches a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping

Cloudflare, a cloud infrastructure provider that serves 20% of the web, announced Tuesday the launch of a new marketplace that reimagines the relationship between website owners and AI companies — ideally giving publishers greater control over their content. For the last year, Cloudflare has launched tools for publishers to address the rampant rise of AI crawlers, including a one-click solution to block all AI bots, as well as a dashboard to view how AI crawlers are visiting their site. In a 20

Cloudflare open-sources Orange Meets with End-to-End encryption

Cloudflare has implemented end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to its video calling app Orange Meets and open-sourced the solution for transparency. The application has been available since last year when the internet giant launched it as a demo for Cloudflare Calls (now Realtime). With the introduction of E2EE and the resolution of various trust and verification issues, users interested in strong cryptographic assurances can explore Orange Meets as a foundation for secure video calling in research o

Cloudflare blocks largest DDoS attack - here's how to protect yourself

oxygen/Getty Cloudflare is a robust content delivery network (CDN) that specializes in providing protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Last month, Cloudflare blocked the largest DDoS attack in internet history. This assault peaked at a staggering 7.3 terabits per second (Tbps). That's a data deluge, equivalent to streaming nearly 10,000 high-definition movies in under a minute. The attack targeted an unnamed hosting provider using Cloudflare's Magic Transit DDoS pro

How to turn on Android's Private DNS mode - and why turning it off is a big mistake

Jack Wallen / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Nearly everything you do on your desktop, laptop, phone, and tablet begins with a Domain Name System (DNS) query. Essentially, DNS turns domain names (such as ZDNET.com) into an IP address so web browsers and apps know where to get the information you want. Also: The best Android phones to buy in 2025 Without DNS, you'd have to type 34.149.132.124 every time you wanted to go to ZDNET.com or 74.125.21.102 to go to Google.com. Even by simply running a

Russia’s throttling of Cloudflare makes sites inaccessible

Starting June 9, 2025, Russian internet service providers (ISPs) began throttling access to websites and services protected by Cloudflare, making sites inaccessible from the country. The throttling is so aggressive, reportedly only allowing users to download the first 16 KB of any web asset, that it effectively breaks most Cloudflare-backed sites for Russian netizens. Cloudflare maintains that it has not received formal communication about this from the Russian state but considers this action

How Cloudflare blocked a monumental 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack

9 min read This post is also available in Français ไทย and Deutsch In mid-May 2025, Cloudflare blocked the largest DDoS attack ever recorded: a staggering 7.3 terabits per second (Tbps). This comes shortly after the publication of our DDoS threat report for 2025 Q1 on April 27, 2025, where we highlighted attacks reaching 6.5 Tbps and 4.8 billion packets per second (pps). The 7.3 Tbps attack is 12% larger than our previous record and 1 Tbps greater than a recent attack reported by cyber securit

How to turn on Android's Private DNS mode - and why it's an absolute must for security

Jack Wallen / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Nearly everything you do on your desktop, laptop, phone, and tablet begins with a Domain Name System (DNS) query. Essentially, DNS turns domain names (such as ZDNET.com) into an IP address so web browsers and apps know where to get the information you want. Also: How to enable earthquake alerts on your Android phone (including these Samsung models) Without DNS, you'd have to type 34.149.132.124 every time you wanted to go to ZDNET.com or 74.125.21.10

Cloudflare CEO warns AI crawlers and summaries are eroding the internet's business model

In context: Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince recently reiterated his warning that generative AI crawlers and summaries threaten the foundations of the internet's business model. To protect publishers from a flood of artificial AI traffic that offers virtually no authentic site visits in return, the company is devising methods to combat AI scrapers. Speaking at an Axios event in Cannes last week, Prince explained that search engines and chatbots using generative AI to summarize web content have sig

Cloudflare blocks record 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack against hosting provider

Cloudflare says it mitigated a record-breaking distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in May 2025 that peaked at 7.3 Tbps, targeting a hosting provider. DDoS attacks flood targets with massive amounts of traffic with the sole aim to overwhelm servers and create service slowdowns, disruptions, or outages. This new attack, which is 12% larger than the previous record, delivered a massive data volume of 37.4 TB in just 45 seconds. This is the equivalent of about 7,500 hours of HD streaming o

Google links massive cloud outage to API management issue

Google says an API management issue is behind Thursday's massive Google Cloud outage, which disrupted or brought down its services and many other online platforms. Google says the cloud outage started around 10:49 ET and ended at 3:49 ET, after causing issues for millions of users worldwide for over three hours. Besides Google Cloud, the incident also impacted Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Chat, Google Cloud Search, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Meet, Google Tasks, Google Voice, Google Le

The cloud broke Thursday and it'll happen again - how to protect your business before then

Akaradech Pramoonsin/Getty Images After a rocky Thursday afternoon on the internet, both Google and Cloudflare services appear to be operating normally as of Friday morning. When trouble started, the question wasn't what's wrong with what cloud service; it was, what service isn't down? Also: The best cloud storage services of 2025: Expert tested What happened on Thursday? First, this was not just an American problem. Google Cloud reported that it was a global problem. Google stated that mult

Cloudflare: Outage not caused by security incident, data is safe

Cloudflare has confirmed that the massive service outage yesterday was not caused by a security incident and no data has been lost. The issue has been largely mitigated. It started 17:52 UTC yesterday when the Workers KV (Key-Value) system went completely offline, causing widespread service losses across multiple edge computing and AI services. Workers KV is a globally distributed, consistent key-value store used by Cloudflare Workers, the company’s serverless computing platform. It is a funda

PSA: Widespread internet outage affects Spotify, Google, Discord, Cloudflare, more [U: Fixed]

Update: The issue has now been resolved. The original post follows below. If you’re having trouble accessing multiple major services today, you’re definitely not alone. Reports from users, and confirmed by data from Downdetector, indicate a widespread internet outage is currently impacting a wide range of popular platforms and infrastructure providers. Among the affected services: Spotify Google services (including Google Cloud, Meet, Drive, and Nest) Discord CharacterAI Snapchat Cloudfl

PSA: Widespread internet outage affects Spotify, Google, Discord, Cloudflare, more [U]

If you’re having trouble accessing multiple major services today, you’re definitely not alone. Reports from users, and confirmed by data from Downdetector, indicate a widespread internet outage is currently impacting a wide range of popular platforms and infrastructure providers. Among the affected services: Spotify Google services (including Google Cloud, Meet, Drive, and Nest) Discord CharacterAI Snapchat Cloudflare Pokemon TCG Live FuboTV Etsy Downdetector has logged massive spikes

Google Cloud and Cloudflare hit by widespread service outages

Google Cloud and Cloudflare are investigating ongoing outages impacting access to sites and various services across multiple regions. Cloudflare first acknowledged these issues less than 30 minutes ago when it reported Access authentication failures and Cloudflare Zero Trust WARP connectivity issues. "We are seeing a number of services suffer intermittent failures. We are continuing to investigate this and we will update this list as we assess the impact on a per-service level," it added in a

Show HN: S3mini – Tiny and fast S3-compatible client, no-deps, edge-ready

s3mini is an ultra-lightweight Typescript client (~14 KB minified, ≈15 % more ops/s) for S3-compatible object storage. It runs on Node, Bun, Cloudflare Workers, and other edge platforms. It has been tested on Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, DigitalOcean Spaces, and MinIO. (No Browser support!) [github] [issues] [npm] Dev: Performance tests was done on local Minio instance. Your results may vary depending on environment and network conditions, so take it with a grain of salt. The library support