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Cloudflare Is Blocking AI Crawlers by Default
The age of the AI scraping free-for-all may be coming to an end. At least if Cloudflare gets its way.
“We’ve been feverishly trying to protect ourselves,” says Danielle Coffey, the president and CEO of the trade group News Media Alliance, which represents several thousand North American outlets. So far, Cloudflare’s head of AI control, privacy, and media products, Will Allen, tells WIRED, over 1 million customer websites have activated its older AI-bot-blocking tools. In this context, Cloudflare’s shift to blocking by default could prove a significant roadblock to surreptitious scrapers and could give publishers more leverage to negotiate, whether through the Pay Per Crawl program or otherwise.
Or read this on Wired