Cloudflare Adds Granular Controls to Separate AI Training from Search Indexing
Cloudflare has rolled out updated AI-crawler controls that allow website owners to block AI model training while still permitting search indexing, replacing its previous all-or-nothing 'Block AI Bots' toggle. The new system introduces three distinct policy categories — Search, Training, and Agent — giving publishers finer control over how automated bots interact with their content. A new default configuration, effective September 15, 2026, will block Training and Agent crawlers while keeping Search crawlers allowed. Cloudflare is also replacing its Managed Robots.txt feature with Bot Preference Sync, which automatically aligns a site's robots.txt file with its configured crawler policies to prevent conflicting signals. The update is designed to benefit ad-supported and content-driven sites that rely on organic search visibility but wish to opt out of contributing to AI training datasets.
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