> Another change that will apply on September 15 is that multi-purpose crawlers (specifically those that combine Search with Training) will be allowed/blocked according to all of their behaviors, in line with our call for transparency for website owners. Since the defaults will be enforced by the most restrictive applicable rules, multi-purpose crawlers such as Googlebot, Applebot, and BingBot will be blocked by customers who have selected to block Training (either through the new options to manage AI traffic, or through the legacy Block AI bots service).
This is unfortunately nothing new. There's no correct way to tell them to fuck off, they do not care, and they never will do. People have even taken them to court over this
It's kind of exhausting seeing Cloudflare playing both sides of the arms race.
I just can't imagine bringing myself to use their technology to build agents and build AI products when they're also doing things like this.
And even more so, LLM language aside, fun and fascinating to see them flagrantly calling out their position here as if it's a positive.
I want pay-per-crawl. I clicked the link for it a year ago, got presented with a "request access" button, I "requested access" and obviously since I'm nobody I heard absolutely nothing. Now they're touting the link again, I checked, still that same "request access" button. I have no idea if anyone even has access to this feature.
I don't care about all this other stuff, I want the AI crawlers to pay me cash. Because boy do those fuckers want to crawl me. I'll gladly double the size of my gerrit/jenkins servers to keep up with the load if these stupid bots want to pay to crawl every jenkins build artifact and every changeset source file on the server, as they really seem to want to do.