The big news here is that Googlebot will be blocked from September 15th onwards by one the "block training" policies, because Google use the same crawler infrastructure for their search index AND for training Gemini:
> Another change that will apply on September 15 is that multi-purpose crawlers (specifically those that combine Search with Training) will be allowed/blocked according to all of their behaviors, in line with our call for transparency for website owners. Since the defaults will be enforced by the most restrictive applicable rules, multi-purpose crawlers such as Googlebot, Applebot, and BingBot will be blocked by customers who have selected to block Training (either through the new options to manage AI traffic, or through the legacy Block AI bots service).
We had googlebot blast a random customer system and almost cause an outage, this is when I first learnt that google will use it for AI training also. It's honestly kind of frustrating also because you then search on it and theres (was) nothing on how you are meant to "correctly" tell google to fuck off, and not use it like that.
Google's web scraping functionality has been acting as a ddos for more than two decades. I've seen literally hundreds of reports of them attacking websites and taking them down, where there's nothing you can do but accept the traffic, or get delisted
This is unfortunately nothing new. There's no correct way to tell them to fuck off, they do not care, and they never will do. People have even taken them to court over this
> For all new domains onboarding to Cloudflare, the categories of Training and Agent will be blocked by default on the pages that display ads, while Search will remain allowed by default.
It's kind of exhausting seeing Cloudflare playing both sides of the arms race.
I just can't imagine bringing myself to use their technology to build agents and build AI products when they're also doing things like this.
> This also lines up the incentive model we want to foster. Losing trusted status across the more than 20% of web domains that sit behind Cloudflare is a deterrent with teeth. Trust becomes something you can carry with you, and something you can lose.
And even more so, LLM language aside, fun and fascinating to see them flagrantly calling out their position here as if it's a positive.
Please consider installing one of the many PoW schemes such as anubis rather than use these cloudflare "features". I increasingly encounter outright blocks rather than any sort of captcha when visiting cloudflare "protected" sites. Each individual site isn't particularly important to me but it's depressing to watch the process unfold like this. You really are choosing to erode the core basis of the internet if you go this route.
>I increasingly encounter outright blocks rather than any sort of captcha when visiting cloudflare "protected" sites.
???
Unless you're browsing around with the googlebot user agent string, you should be getting turnstile challanges at most, not blocks. And if you're getting a turnstile challenge it's unclear how it's different than an anubis challenge. If you're outright blocked, it's probably a site decision (eg. block all VPNs or block everyone not from a given country) rather than cloudflare's.
this is annoying, it makes a big deal about "Back when we announced pay-per-crawl"...
I want pay-per-crawl. I clicked the link for it a year ago, got presented with a "request access" button, I "requested access" and obviously since I'm nobody I heard absolutely nothing. Now they're touting the link again, I checked, still that same "request access" button. I have no idea if anyone even has access to this feature.
I don't care about all this other stuff, I want the AI crawlers to pay me cash. Because boy do those fuckers want to crawl me. I'll gladly double the size of my gerrit/jenkins servers to keep up with the load if these stupid bots want to pay to crawl every jenkins build artifact and every changeset source file on the server, as they really seem to want to do.
What would force their hand?
It’s more likely they’ll strike undisclosed agreements with major sources of discussion like reddit etc.
That’s not to say getting new information as a way of context-providing is not going to happen but that’s not scraping.
> Another change that will apply on September 15 is that multi-purpose crawlers (specifically those that combine Search with Training) will be allowed/blocked according to all of their behaviors, in line with our call for transparency for website owners. Since the defaults will be enforced by the most restrictive applicable rules, multi-purpose crawlers such as Googlebot, Applebot, and BingBot will be blocked by customers who have selected to block Training (either through the new options to manage AI traffic, or through the legacy Block AI bots service).
This is unfortunately nothing new. There's no correct way to tell them to fuck off, they do not care, and they never will do. People have even taken them to court over this
It's kind of exhausting seeing Cloudflare playing both sides of the arms race.
I just can't imagine bringing myself to use their technology to build agents and build AI products when they're also doing things like this.
And even more so, LLM language aside, fun and fascinating to see them flagrantly calling out their position here as if it's a positive.
???
Unless you're browsing around with the googlebot user agent string, you should be getting turnstile challanges at most, not blocks. And if you're getting a turnstile challenge it's unclear how it's different than an anubis challenge. If you're outright blocked, it's probably a site decision (eg. block all VPNs or block everyone not from a given country) rather than cloudflare's.
I want pay-per-crawl. I clicked the link for it a year ago, got presented with a "request access" button, I "requested access" and obviously since I'm nobody I heard absolutely nothing. Now they're touting the link again, I checked, still that same "request access" button. I have no idea if anyone even has access to this feature.
I don't care about all this other stuff, I want the AI crawlers to pay me cash. Because boy do those fuckers want to crawl me. I'll gladly double the size of my gerrit/jenkins servers to keep up with the load if these stupid bots want to pay to crawl every jenkins build artifact and every changeset source file on the server, as they really seem to want to do.