New options to manage AI traffic

Not all AI traffic is the same. Now, all customers — including those on the Free plan — can manage AI crawlers based on what they actually do on your site. Cloudflare groups AI traffic into three behaviors you can control independently: Search, Agent, and Training. This lets you keep the automated traffic that sends readers and revenue back to you, while blocking the traffic that only takes from your content.

Each behavior maps to a real use case. Search covers crawlers that index your content so they can answer questions about it later, where you should expect referral traffic or other equitable compensation in return. Agent covers automated activity acting in real time on a person's behalf, such as chat fetch bots and browser-use agents. Training covers crawlers that take your content to train or fine-tune a model. For each preset you can choose to block on all pages, block only on pages that display ads, or choose not to block.

Starting September 15, 2026, new domains onboarding to Cloudflare receive updated defaults: Bots classified as Training or as Agent are blocked on pages that display ads, while Search remains allowed. On that date, multi-purpose crawlers that combine Search and Training will be affected by the new defaults to block Training. All customers can opt out of the new defaults at any time before September 15.