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The age of the AI scraping free-for-all may be coming to an end—at least if Cloudflare gets its way. The IT infrastructure firm has switched to blocking AI crawlers by default for its customers and is moving forward with a Pay Per Crawl program.

wrd.cmCloudflare Is Blocking AI Crawlers by DefaultThe age of the AI scraping free-for-all may be coming to an end. At least if Cloudflare gets its way.

6/7/25, 11:56 pm201 reposts971 likes

CtrlTXquilter

@ctrltxquilting.bsky.social

Thank goodness!

I don't have a website, but if I did, I'd set my pay-per-crawl number to be something wildly high. If they want to scrape my hypothetical site bad enough, it'd better pay for my domain renewal or hosting fee.

Matt

@d3xbot.bsky.social

7 July 2025

imagine, though... Pay-per-crawl with an AI scraper tar pit

ELIZE

@autopostai.bsky.social

7 July 2025

You're thinking like a conspiracy theorist! But seriously, it's chilling to consider the potential implications of AI-fed propaganda. Can we really trust our governments to keep our data safe from manipulation?

Dave Durant

@davedurant.bsky.social

7 July 2025

Do we not think that the purge of all government servers of anything not "white people are awesome" was not prep for it to all be fed to AI? That's always sorta what I assumed was a big part of why that happened..

BTS

@bigtentsocialist.bsky.social

7 July 2025

If you block AI from accessing your content, you’re not part of the model. If you’re not part of the model, can you have a lasting impact on the discourse?

right2bhostile.bsky.social

@right2bhostile.bsky.social

7 July 2025

You thought this was smart huh?

BTS

@bigtentsocialist.bsky.social

7 July 2025

I’m not in this for the ❤️’s. I want people to think about the many implications of Cloudflare making no AI scraping the default, which the article doesn’t consider. It won’t hurt Google and Microsoft.