Future Media w/ Ricky Sutton and Chapell It’s cat and mouse, but we will charge the AIs - Cloudflare
8 snips
Oct 7, 2025 Will Allen, Vice President of Product at Cloudflare, discusses the company's initiative to protect publishers from AI crawlers misusing their content. He elaborates on the balance Cloudflare seeks to strike between enabling responsible AI access and safeguarding creators' rights. The podcast dives into enforcement tactics, with a focus on distinguishing between good and bad AI actors, and potential legal remedies for publishers. Allen also addresses innovative pricing models and emphasizes Cloudflare's commitment to customer empowerment and high-quality content amid the AI influx.
AI Snips
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Transcript
Episode notes
Cloudflare’s Pay-Per-Crawl Shift
- Cloudflare aims to require AI crawlers to pay via HTTP 402 so publishers can monetize training and inference use of their content.
- The move could restore control to creators and preserve an open web by discouraging unfettered scraping.
Reclaim Control Over Your Content
- Publishers should reclaim control by auditing traffic, defining access policies, and enforcing them through Cloudflare tools.
- Set clear rules (block, allow, or price access) based on your content strategy and audience goals.
Good Path Versus Bad Actors
- Bad actors will keep scraping but Cloudflare focuses on making the legitimate path easy and empowering publishers to block abusers.
- The fight is a cat-and-mouse game, but enforcement and visibility raise the cost of evasion.