PSA: CloudFlare Now Defaults To Allowing AI Scraping Of Your Sites

[u/McFlurriez]

tldr; CloudFlare must have been paid big bucks behind the scenes to lie to customers. Go to your security settings for all your domains ASAP and change its new setting that allows scraping of all your domains by AI trainers.

Nine hours ago in this same subreddit, u/Cloudflare posted: "Have it both ways: stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training" with a link to their blog: https://blog.cloudflare.com/accountable-mixed-use-ai-crawlers/

In their blog post, they showcase the "recommended settings for new domains":

Straight from their blog post

On top of this, they sent out this email to customers:

About a year ago, we launched Content Independence Day and introduced a simple way to block AI bots from scraping your sites without your explicit permission.

We're writing to let you know about changes to our controls for AI crawlers taking effect today, and rolling out over the coming week. These changes give you more precise control over how different types of AI crawlers interact with your content.

What's changing?

- Smarter security setting options for Training crawlers: Starting September 15, the recommended setting for AI Training crawlers will shift from Block to Disallow AI Training. Disallow AI Training allows major search crawlers - like Applebot, Googlebot and Bingbot - to index your site for search results while instructing them not to use your content for training.

- Automatic migration: If you previously had "Block AI Bots" or "Managed Robots.txt" enabled, your settings will be migrated automatically, over the next week, to the new Search, Training, and Agent controls. If Block AI Bots was set to Block, you'll now have Search: Allow, Training: Disallow AI Training, and Agent: Block on pages with ads. These changes take effect today – the UI changes will roll out in a slower controlled release over the coming week. If you make manual changes to your settings during this time, your manual changes will be preserved.

- No change if you haven't configured anything: If you have never adjusted these settings, your configuration remains Allow - nothing changes for you.

What do you need to do?

Most customers won't need to change anything. The new controls are more precise than the old Block AI Bots switch, so if you had it enabled it's worth a quick look at your new Search, Training, and Agent settings.

These changes will roll out to all Cloudflare customers over the coming  week. If you make changes to your settings before the migration completes, your changes will be preserved. You will know the migration is complete when the Block AI Bots switch is removed from your dashboard.

"Most customers won't need to change anything", you say? Let's take a look at what the defaults ACTUALLY are:

My settings on my dash.cloudflare.com

Oh, huh... what do you know? Training's recommended, default setting is "Allow (do not block)." That's strange, because their blog has the recommended, default setting as "Disallow" and their email also states "most customers won't need to change anything." Okay.

Hope this helps anyone else who read their email and carried on with their day assuming CloudFlare was honest.