Cloudflare to block AI training on ad pages by default from Sept. 2026

Cloudflare announced a significant policy change on Wednesday, July 1, 2026, that will give website publishers more control over how artificial intelligence companies access and use their content. Starting September 15, 2026, new websites on Cloudflare’s platform will, by default, allow traditional search indexing while blocking AI training and AI agent access on pages that host advertisements.

The change, which also applies to new sites set up by existing customers and all existing free-tier customers, is designed to address what the company sees as an unsustainable dynamic in the modern internet. Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince stated that with the majority of internet traffic now being non-human, faster action is required. The policy aims to force AI companies to clearly separate their web-crawling bots by function, giving publishers the choice to remain discoverable via search without automatically having their work used to train commercial AI models.

Cloudflare specifically referenced the challenges posed by what it calls "mixed-use" crawlers, which combine search indexing with AI training. The company argued that this practice makes it difficult for...