Cloudflare reshapes the AI landscape by blocking Big Tech AI bot crawlers by default, allowing websites to demand payment for content access.

Internet firm Cloudflare has started blocking AI web crawlers to prevent them from "accessing content without permission or compensation," by default according to an announcement on Tuesday.

Cloudflare aims to make such deals occur through a network handshake. The firm's payment service, now in private beta testing, is called Pay per crawl.

Cloudflare’s new model is an attempt to put the control of online content back into the hands of its original creators and owners. It follows a similar attempt by Creative Commons, which recently ...

Cloudflare Inc. (NYSE:NET) is one of the best NYSE stocks to buy for long term investment. On July 1, Cloudflare launched a significant AI Crawler Blocking feature, which gives website owners ...

Although Cloudflare singled out Google, other search engines that view AI search features as part of their search products also use the same bots for training as they do for search indexing.

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.

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Cloudflare has launched a tool that blocks bot crawlers from accessing content without permission or compensation to help websites make money from AI firms trying to access and ...