Currently, over 16% of global internet traffic passes through Cloudflare, serving as a crucial cornerstone of the internet ecosystem. This week, the company announced a new policy: all newly registered domains will have AI crawlers blocked by default, and simultaneously launched a "Pay Per Crawl" mechanism. This move suddenly confronts large models that have long been freely extracting data with a payment gateway, and for the first time gives content owners a negotiation lever.
Policy Key Points: Default Blocking and Pay-per-Crawl
Cloudflare's new policy flips the crawling access mode from "default allowed" to "permission required", immediately blocking new domains; existing customers can switch with one click in the backend.
More critically, the new "Pay Per Crawl" system allows website administrators to set different prices for three purposes: "training, inference, and search". When a crawler reaches a website, the server will return an HTTP 402 Payment Required, demanding payment before access. Cloudflare will collect and settle fees, providing reports on usage, frequency, and payments.
CEO Matthew Prince publicly stated:
"Our goal is to help content creators regain control of their intellectual property and receive fair compensation."
Market Response: Media Welcomes, Laboratories Worry
Large publishers like TIME and BuzzFeed, who have openly acknowledged traffic impact, have joined the pilot, hoping to add a third revenue stream through this new mechanism beyond subscriptions and licensing (since after AI processes the data, readers may not need to browse the original webpage).
In contrast, developers like OpenAI and Google warn that Cloudflare is becoming an "intermediary" and emphasize their consistent adherence to robots.txt. British lawyer Matthew Holman points out:
"If blocking policies become widespread, it will inevitably slow down model training speed, which will be a huge challenge for the AI industry in the short term."
Estimates suggest that adding 1 trillion training tokens through payment could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, directly raising the entry barrier for model development.
Capital Perspective: Content Licensing Becomes a New Track
Experts estimate that the "content licensing" market could potentially grow from zero to a multi-billion dollar industry. Meanwhile, if Cloudflare successfully promotes this payment model, its differentiation will further expand, putting pressure on Fastly and Akamai, with the capital market already re-evaluating Cloudflare's strategic position.
Follow-up Observation: Data Dark Period or Value Redistribution
If "default blocking of AI crawlers" is widely adopted by other CDNs or cloud services, large models might enter a brief "data dark period". Companies will need to find alternative solutions, such as generating synthetic data, signing licensing agreements with content holders, or using blockchain to track copyrights. The EU's GDPR and France's CNIL emphasis on data "legitimate interest" and "minimization" also align with this trend.
Cloudflare's new system essentially materializes "data is the new oil": AI companies may no longer be able to refuel for free but will need to pay by volume. However, for content producers, this could be good news, enabling monetization of digital assets and initiating a value reassessment.
