‘The only losers from this will be Cloudflare’s customers. Mainly, publishers’: What businesses can do…
Cloudflare is set to make a major change to huge portions of the internet after standing between websites and automated traffic in a bid to protect publishers and hosters. Soon, the company will divide AI-related traffic into one of three categories – search, agent or training – in a bid to give customers more control over just how much automated traffic they’re prepared to let in.
Beginning September 2026, new Cloudflare domains will block agent and training crawlers by default on pages that display ads, arguing that publishers need human visitors to see those ads to generate a revenue.
But huge challenges stand between now and such a system being rolled out effectively, because many major crawlers like Googlebot are defined as multipurpose and don’t exactly fit into one of those three categories. In the worst case scenario, this could prevent any automated traffic from reaching a site, even if...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to techradar.com. To see the full text click HERE
