Cloudflare sets a September 15 deadline for AI companies to differentiate their web crawlers into search, AI training, and AI agents or face being blocked (Samantha Elkins/NBC News)
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Cloudflare's crawler deadline forces differentiation, highly relevant and actionable for AI/web companies.
Summary
Cloudflare is requiring AI companies to classify their web crawlers into distinct categories—search indexing, AI training data collection, and AI agent interactions—by September 15, 2025. Failure to comply will result in those crawlers being blocked by Cloudflare's network. This policy aims to give website owners granular control over how their content is accessed and used by different AI-related bot activities.