Cloudflare strikes back! The default "block AI crawlers" has sparked a new battle for paid content scraping.

Cloudflare's new policy defaults to blocking AI crawlers and launches a "Pay-Per-Crawl" marketplace, potentially forcing AI operators to pay for content access, while content publishers and CDNs welcome a new valuation narrative. (Background: Meta aggressively acquires AI talent, Zuckerberg claims "annual salary exceeds $100 million"; Sam Altman sarcastically remarks: can’t buy the best employees) (Additional background: OpenAI reportedly plans to launch an AI version of Office software, competing head-on with Microsoft and Google) Currently, over 16% of global internet traffic flows through Cloudflare, making it a crucial cornerstone of the internet ecosystem. This week, the company announced a new rule: starting today, all newly registered domains will default to blocking AI crawlers, alongside the launch of the "Pay Per Crawl" mechanism. This move puts a sudden toll gate on large models that have long accessed data for free and allows content owners to finally hold bargaining leverage. Key policy points: Default blocking and pay-per-use Cloudflare's new rule flips the crawler access mode from "default allowed" to "requires permission," with new domains immediately activating the block; existing customers can switch with one click in the backend. More importantly, the new "Pay Per Crawl" system allows website administrators to set different prices for "training, inference, and search" purposes. When a crawler reaches the website, the server will respond with HTTP 402 Payment Required, requiring payment before access. Fees will be collected and settled by Cloudflare, providing reports on usage, frequency, and payments. CEO Matthew Prince publicly stated: "Our goal is to give content creators back control over their intellectual property and receive fair compensation for it." Market reaction: Media welcomes it, laboratories express concern Major publishers like TIME and BuzzFeed, who have openly acknowledged the impact on traffic, have joined the pilot program, hoping to add a third revenue stream beyond subscriptions and licenses through the new mechanism (after all, once AI organizes the data, readers no longer need to browse the original web pages). Conversely, developers such as OpenAI and Google warn that Cloudflare is becoming an "intermediary" and emphasize that they have always complied with robots.txt. UK lawyer Matthew Holman pointed out: "If the blocking policy is widely enforced, it will inevitably slow down model training speeds, which will be a huge challenge for the AI industry in the short term." According to estimates, if paid access to an additional trillion training labels is required, costs could reach hundreds of millions of dollars, directly raising the threshold for model development. Capital perspective: Content licensing becomes a new battleground Experts estimate that the market size for "content licensing" has the potential to evolve from zero into a multibillion-dollar industry. At the same time, if Cloudflare successfully promotes the paid model, differentiation will further expand, putting pressure on Fastly and Akamai, and the capital market has reevaluated Cloudflare's strategic position. Follow-up observation: Data dark period or value redistribution If in the future, "default blocking of AI crawlers" is widely adopted by other CDNs or cloud services, large models may fall into a brief "data dark period." Operators will inevitably need to find alternatives, such as generating synthetic data, signing licensing agreements with content owners, or using Blockchain to track copyrights. The EU's GDPR and France's CNIL emphasis on "legitimate interests" and "minimization" also aligns with this trend. Cloudflare's new system effectively materializes the notion that "data is the new oil": AI companies may no longer be able to fuel up for free in the future, but will have to pay according to volume; however, this may be good news for content producers, enabling them to monetize digital assets and ushering in a new phase of value reassessment. Related reports: Downloading others' creations and then using AI to alter images is illegal! China’s first AI copyright infringement criminal case results in imprisonment and fines Musk says there are too many errors in AI knowledge, "Grok3.5 needs to rebuild the correct version for humanity"; CZ responds: a singular historical perspective will have issues. <Cloudflare strikes! Default "block AI crawlers" initiates a new war over paid content scraping> This article was first published in BlockTempo, the most influential Blockchain news media.