Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince didn’t make his biggest AI announcement in a press release or earnings call. He made it one X reply at a time.
Earlier this month, Cloudflare launched what it called “Content Independence Day,” a policy change that blocks AI companies from scraping the websites it protects unless they compensate content creators. The move challenges the decades-old web economy where companies like Google could freely index content in exchange for traffic, and replaces it with a new, much tougher standard: no more crawling without a deal.
But the real story is what happened next.
In a series of unfiltered X (formerly Twitter) replies over several days, Prince revealed that Cloudflare is already treating some AI giants as violators, signaling a dramatic power shift in who sets the rules of the web.
One of the most notable admissions? “Gemini is blocked by default,” Prince wrote on July 3, referring to Google’s AI model. In other words, Google’s AI agents are no longer welcome to freely ingest data from websites protected by Cloudflare unless Google complies with new rules or pays.
That’s a huge deal. Cloudflare protects roughly 20% of the web, including major publishers, media outlets, and creator platforms. If it cuts off AI crawlers from those sites, the large language models that power today’s chatbots, AI summaries, and answer boxes could go hungry.
A major sticking point for publishers has been Googlebot, Google’s main crawler, which traditionally indexed content for search. Now, Googlebot is also used to feed data to Google’s AI models, including its new AI Overviews and the Gemini LLM (Large Language Model) that powers many of its generative AI features. This dual role creates a conflict of interest for creators who want to appear in traditional search results but not have their content used for AI training without compensation.
Prince made it clear that Google’s current practices won’t be allowed under the old terms. “We will get Google to provide ways to block Answer Box and AI Overview, without blocking classic search indexing, as well,” he wrote. If not? “We have a number of other ways to force them to.”
Translation: Cloudflare, a company once known for protecting websites from DDoS attacks, now sees itself as a watchdog for the AI economy, and it’s not afraid to flex.
Gemini is blocked by default. We will get Google to provide ways to block Answer Box and AI Overview, without blocking classic search indexing, as well. — Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 3, 2025
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