Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients' websites

However, such systems don't provide the same opportunities for monetization and credit as search engines historically have. AI models draw from a great deal of data on the web to generate their outputs, but these data sources are often not credited, limiting the creators' ability to make money from their work. Search engines that feature AI-generated answers may include links to original sources, but they may also reduce people's interest in clicking through to other sites and could even usher in a "zero-click" future. "Traditionally, the unspoken agreement was that a search engine could index your content, then they would show the relevant links to a particular query and send you traffic back to your website," Will Allen, Cloudflare's head of AI privacy, control, and media products, wrote in an email to MIT Technology Review. Generally, creators and publishers want to decide how their content is used, how it's associated with them, and how they are paid for it.