Cloudflare has started blocking AI crawlers from accessing its clients’ websites by default. This matters because it changes the fundamental economics of publishing online content.
For the past twenty years, the deal was straightforward: search engines crawled your content, indexed it, and sent you traffic in return. You got visitors, they got comprehensive search results, everyone benefited.
AI models broke that arrangement. They crawl your content, extract what they need and generate answers - without sending traffic back. No attribution, no visibility, no return. You did the work but they take the value.
This article was first published on the ENVEE Digital blog.
