How to Control AI Crawlers with Cloudflare: Protect or Promote Your Website Content

The way people find and engage with online content is evolving. With the rise of artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews, users are no longer relying solely on traditional search results. Instead, they’re getting answers directly from AI tools, which are often powered by publicly available website content. 

But here’s the kicker: many websites may soon be accidentally invisible to these AI platforms. So, if your content isn’t being seen, you’re missing out on potential reach, influence, and even revenue. 

For organisations that publish high-value, information-rich content - whether that’s a university sharing research, a tourism body promoting destinations, or a retailer optimising product descriptions - this shift has big implications. 

At Reading Room, we’re helping clients navigate this change and make informed decisions about how their content is accessed, monetised, and protected.

Why Cloudflare Matters in the Age of AI 

Cloudflare is a popular platform used to improve website performance and security. They are committed to making the internet safer for all, and have recently announced new tools that give site owners greater control over how their content is accessed by AI bots and crawlers. 

Going forward, Cloudflare will begin to block many of these AI platforms from crawling your website. While this protects content from being scraped, it also means your organisation might not be included in AI-generated responses, which are quickly becoming a new way users discover information online.

Visibility vs Privacy: Making the Right Call for Your Content 

The question we’re now asking with clients is no longer just ‘How do we rank in Google?’ but also, ‘Are we showing up in AI-generated answers?’. Whilst the tools to measure AI search appearance have yet to catch up, preparing for AI has become the newest part of any SEO strategy. Google’s Search Generative Experience, which uses generative AI to provide users with summarised answers to their queries, is quickly becoming a popular way for users to discover companies and their offerings. 

If your content is designed to reach and inform, reports , FAQs, educational resources, or product details, then visibility on AI platforms could be extremely valuable. Making that content accessible to trusted AI crawlers can help reinforce your brand, increase indirect traffic, and extend your reach beyond traditional SEO. 

But this doesn’t mean throwing open the gates: not all content should be available for AI use. For example, organisations working in healthcare, education, finance, or legal sectors may need to limit or fully block AI access to protect user data, uphold compliance, or safeguard intellectual property. The key is to make conscious, strategic choices about what’s visible, and what’s not.

A New Way to Monetise High-Value Content 

Cloudflare’s latest feature, ‘Pay-Per-Crawl,’ introduces an entirely new opportunity: the ability to charge AI companies for access to your content. 

This means that organisations producing original, high-quality, or research-driven content can now license it to AI, rather than giving it away for free. For publishers, membership bodies, think tanks, or legal firms, this could be a new revenue stream, or at the very least, a way to maintain control over how and where their content appears. 

If monetisation isn’t the goal, the same tools can still be used to limit or block content access altogether, ensuring sensitive or proprietary information stays protected. For some, the best approach is to opt in and capture value; for others, it’s to opt out and protect what’s theirs.

Beware the SEO and Performance Pitfalls 

One of the more subtle risks of this new landscape is misconfiguration. We’ve seen cases where AI bots are mistaken for search engine crawlers, or vice versa. If your firewall rules or robots.txt files are too aggressive, you might unintentionally block legitimate search engines like Google or Bing, affecting your rankings and discoverability. Conversely, if access is too open, your site could experience performance issues, unnecessary server load, or unverified data scraping. Whilst safety measures such as Cloudflare's new AI tools may initially result in decreased traffic, the remaining traffic will be a much better representation of actual human visitors. 

This is where nuance matters. It’s not about choosing between ‘all access’ and ‘no access’, but rather about precision - identifying the right bots, setting the right rules, and monitoring how they behave. Using Cloudflare’s verified crawler lists and third-party tools, SEO and technical teams are able to track and adjust access over time.

What Should You Do Next? 

If your organisation publishes content online, and particularly if that content is central to your strategy, it’s time to revisit how that content is being accessed, used, and potentially monetised. 

At Reading Room, we recommend taking the following steps (not just for anyone using Cloudflare): 

1. Audit your current AI visibility: Are AI platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity currently crawling your site? Are they allowed to?
2. Segment your content by purpose: Decide what content should be open to AI (e.g. public guides, promotional materials), what should be restricted (e.g. member-only content), and what could be monetised.
3. Implement tailored crawler policies: Using Cloudflare and other tools, set precise rules about who can access what, and under what terms. Understand what impact these rules will have on website performance metrics.
4. Monitor, review, and adapt: This isn’t a set-and-forget job. As AI evolves, so will the tools and the risks. Stay agile, and adjust as needed. 

  

The web is changing. AI platforms are now a key part of how users find and consume information, and whether your organisation benefits or misses out depends on the choices you make today. Cloudflare has made it easier to control, protect, and even monetise your content. But the strategy for using this, needs to be yours. 

At Reading Room, we’re here to help you shape that strategy, ensuring your content works harder, reaches further, and delivers the value it was designed to create. Let’s take a look together.