Cloudflare will now block AI crawlers on your website - and even force them
to pay you

Date:
Wed, 02 Jul 2025 13:05:00 +0000

Description:
Cloudflare is giving creators control over their content, allowing them to charge or block AI web crawlers from accessing their sites.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Cloudfla re is introducing a way to charge AI web scrapers Content creators can
protect their sites from unwanted scrapers Specific crawlers can be granted free access, charged, or blocked

Online creators often have very little control over the types of crawlers
that can access their content, but Cloudflare may have a solution.

The company has revived HTTP response code 402 as a neat way to block or charge AI crawlers to access your site in a new feature it calls pay per crawl.

The best part is, its not a block or charge all control - users will be able to allow specific crawlers to access their site for free, charge others for access, and block the ones you dont want trawling your content. Charging AI crawlers for access

HTTP response code 402, otherwise known as the 402 Payment Required status code, indicates to crawlers payment is needed to access the content. As a result, the crawler can either respond with intent to pay, or is blocked from accessing the content.

As an added bonus, content creators with a block on their site can
effectively tell AI crawlers that they are open to potential payments in the future. (Image credit: Cloudflare)

For those thinking that someone could simply spoof a crawler that has access to the site, Cloudflare is one step ahead. An authentic crawler will use the signature-agent, signature-input, and signature headers to authenticate themselves with Cloudflare.

Cloudflare will then compare a public key from a Ed25519 key pair that is stored in a hosted directory with the URL of the key directory and user agent information that is registered with Cloudflare, thus allowing the authentic crawler through and blocking any spoofed crawlers. (Image credit: Cloudflare)

Crawlers will also be able to crawl the web with a set budget for accessing protected sites using the crawler-exact-price header to accept the proposed price listed by the crawler-price header on the desired site, or preemptively use the crawler-max-price when accessing a site which will grant access if
the price is equal to or less than the crawlers budget.

Cloudflare also has some theories for the potential of pay per crawl in the future. An AI agent can be given a budget to crawl the web when responding to a prompt, allowing the user to access high-quality and relevant content when entering a prompt.

Pay per crawl is currently only available in private beta, but interested parties can reach out to Cloudflare via the link at the bottom of the blog . You might also like These are the best web scraping APIs This mega DDoS
attack broke all records We've reviewed all the best cloud storage



======================================================================
Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/cloudflare-will-now-block-ai-crawlers-on-your-we bsite-and-even-force-them-to-pay-you


--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 (Linux/64)
* Origin: tqwNet Technology News (1337:1/100)