Cloudflare, GoDaddy unite against rogue AI bots

Cloudflare and GoDaddy have forged an alliance to give website owners firmer grip over how artificial intelligence agents consume their content, pushing back against a web ecosystem increasingly optimized for machines rather than the human creators who fund it, according to The Register.

The partnership centers on embedding Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control directly into GoDaddy's hosting platform, granting site operators the ability to grant passage, erect paywalls, or outright block automated scrapers. Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare's chief strategy officer, framed the initiative as laying groundwork for "a new Internet business model" that preserves economic viability for publishers in an era of AI-generated summaries that bypass actual page visits. Beyond simple blocking, the companies endorsed technical standards like the Agent Name Service and Web Bot Auth to cryptographically distinguish legitimate crawlers from bad actors pillaging content.

With Cloudflare shielding roughly twenty percent of websites globally, this joint push represents a significant, albeit incomplete, step toward establishing enforceable rules of engagement. Absent such frameworks, the internet risks becoming a one-way extractive pipeline where AI feasts freely while the original sources of information slowly starve.