Have it both ways: stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training

What happened

Today, Cloudflare is announcing a new Disallow AI Training setting that lets you easily stay indexed for search while refusing to let that same crawler train on your content. Without proper controls, website owners have long faced a difficult tradeoff: allow your content to be used for AI training, or risk losing discoverability in search.

That tradeoff exists because some of the largest organizations on the Internet use mixed-use crawlers: a single crawler serving both search and AI training. Apple, Google, and Microsoft honor or have committed (in a specified time frame) to honor this setting. Mixed-use crawlers were the hard part of the training question. A site-wide yes or no is too blunt: how much of your content appears in a summary matters as much as whether it appears at all.

Key facts

• Without proper controls, website owners have long faced a difficult tradeoff: allow your content to be used for AI training, or risk losing discoverability in search.
• That tradeoff exists because some of the largest organizations on the Internet use mixed-use crawlers: a single crawler serving both search and AI training.
• Today, Cloudflare is announcing a new Disallow AI Training setting that lets you easily stay indexed for search while refusing to let that same crawler train on your content.
• Apple, Google, and Microsoft honor or have committed (in a specified time frame) to honor this setting.
• Mixed-use crawlers were the hard part of the training question.