Cheering for Cloudflare to be the arbiter of what technologies are allowed is incredibly short sighted. They exist to provide their clients with services, including bot mitigation.
Well I suppose it’s a good thing then that the anti-AI shield is opt-in, and Cloudflare isn’t making any decisions for anyone on whether or not AI scrapers get to visit their pages. That little bit of context makes your entire argument fall apart.
There’s a pretty significant difference in request rate. A tool trying to search and summarize will hit a search engine once, and each website maybe 5 times (if every search engine link points to the site).
A bot trying to scrape content from a website can generate thousands or tens of thousands of requests per second.
Well I suppose it’s a good thing then that the anti-AI shield is opt-in, and Cloudflare isn’t making any decisions for anyone on whether or not AI scrapers get to visit their pages. That little bit of context makes your entire argument fall apart.
It isn’t opt in.
You can block all bot page scraping, and also block user initiated AI tools or you can block no traffic.
There isn’t an option to block bot page scraping but allow user initiated AI tools.
Because, as the article points out, Cloudflare is not able to distinguish between the two
Thats not true, I just viewed my panel in CF, and Perplexity is an optional block, which by default is off.
They must be A/B testing a new feature then, it’s not on mine
Log into your dashboard, click “AI Audit”, and you’ll see the toggles.
There’s no appreciable difference on how they affect systems between the two for site owners.
There’s a pretty significant difference in request rate. A tool trying to search and summarize will hit a search engine once, and each website maybe 5 times (if every search engine link points to the site).
A bot trying to scrape content from a website can generate thousands or tens of thousands of requests per second.