Cloudflare blocks AI training without hurting search

Cloudflare launched a new Disallow AI Training setting that lets site owners block AI crawlers from training on their content — while keeping the site indexed for Google. It solves a real tradeoff: mixed-use crawlers like Google's and Apple's used both for search and for training models, so your content was feeding AI systems without your say.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft have all committed to honoring the setting. Cloudflare will roll out more granular controls for AI summaries by early next year.

This is one of those quiet infra changes that will shape how much of the web feeds AI systems. The setting is set per-domain, not per-crawler, so it's broad by default. No one has to go crawl by crawl — if you run a site on Cloudflare, it's already there.

Why this matters for us: the sites we rely on — blogs, forums, small business pages — stop quietly feeding AI models without asking, so the web stays ours instead of becoming a free training set.