Stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training
blog.cloudflare.com57 points by djfergus 6 hours ago
57 points by djfergus 6 hours ago
Important to notice: "Apple, Google, and Microsoft honor or have committed (in a specified time frame) to honor this setting."
Specified Time Frame ;)
I feel like most of these schemes to categorise data as "public but not really" are ultimately doomed to failure. Even if you could trust every AI company in the world to respect these terms, is there anything stopping someone else indexing the data and selling them the information? I know there's copyright law but they're apparently ignoring that anyway.
Ultimately this reminds me of those really early social media profiles (before people understood privacy settings if they even existed) which would say "If you're not my friend you're not allowed to read this page".
If you don't want your content to end up in some database/archive don't publish it for the whole world to see.
"Cloudflare classifies bots by behavior, and a single bot can exhibit more than one behavior."
Is that really true
CF classifies anyone not using a popular browser with Javascript enabled as a "bot"
CF fingerprints www users
As an example, look at CF's Permissions-Policy HTTP response header on a site with CF "bot protection", i.e., the "checking your browser" CAPTCHA nonsense (challenges.cloudflare.com). Then look at IA's Permissions-Policy response header. One CDN is advertiser-focused, the other is user-focused
IA = Internet Archive
CF classifies anyone not using a popular browser with Javascript enabled as a "bot"
This is my biggest complaint about CF. They are implicitly supporting user-agent discrimination in favour of Big Browser, instead of discriminating on actual behaviour.
...and of course there are already companies running tons of VMs with "officially sanctioned" browser + OS stacks, that can get past all these "protections", for a fee.
"AI bots" is the newest boogeyman they came up with to take away freedom.
As far as I can tell, after months of fighting being DDoSed by Anthropic and OpenAI across 50+ sites - Cloudflare also allows what it considers "good bots" through all of your bot blocking rules, with no option to turn this off unless you pay them money.
"Accountable" is just a fancy word for "pinky promise, but with a label." Nothing stops the data from ending up in a training run once it's already been fetched.
...and the only way to stop[1] that is by effectively DRM'ing everything, which is a level of dystopia that I don't think even Stallman ever anticipated, nor do I want to happen.
[1] Analog hole and other workarounds aside, naturally.
I didn't know websites could opt out of providing data to Google's AI training. Looks Google added support for this via 'Google-Extended' in robots.txt back in 2023:
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/an-update-on-...
The irony is that search engines are AI companies now. Telling them 'index me for search but don't train your models' is asking them to split a brain that’s already fully merged.
there have been a few links here on hn about content protection based on Markov’s chain. It might be interesting for Cloudflare to add damage for the scraper that tries to query the page, and not just blocking them.
What does this really mean though? You can use an LLM to search.
I maintain a cloud IP ranges database, and I'm going to test this out.
I have my doubts, though. A formal title like "Accountable" (capitalized) sounds deliberate, but I can't help imagining the renewal email:
"Hey, want to renew your Accountable™ license? Just pinky promise again that you use your IPs for what you say you do."
I wonder if protocols like Web Bot Auth [1] will see wider adoption. At least as a supported mechanism for those bots which identify themselves. The rest probably still have to be treated with Anubis. In my free time I've recently been experimenting with a Web Bot Auth implementation as an Envoy dynamic module [2] to have a way to define some additional policies for the traffic from bots.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-webbotauth-https... [2] https://github.com/michalskalski/envoy-web-bot-auth
I'm playing around with it for my MCP hiring protocol ojcp[1] and it seems to work very well for signing attestations at the header level.
> Accountable mixed-use crawlers remain allowed for search. Every other training crawler is blocked, including the training-only crawlers run by Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI — blocking those does not affect search.
> We also categorize the relevant crawlers from Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI as Accountable. These organizations separate their Search and Training crawlers, so Cloudflare can block the Training crawler without affecting search.
I find it difficult to trust that either Meta or OpenAI would use their separate search and training crawlers only for the respective purposes. Their pinky promises have no value, IMO. Both companies are premised on deceptive behaviors.
I wouldn’t trust an AI company to honor this as far as I could throw them
“Pre-label your most valuable data for us and we promise to not make it too obvious that we’re training on it”
This seems useful for my site. I don't really want competitors' AI systems use our research data to train their models.
what weirds me out is the analytics
theres no way my index.html page with nothing is getting 10000 hits a day
wtf?
7 per minute.
I use my high school’s website to test Internet connectivity bc the domain is short and they don’t do a TLS redirect (making it easy to detect WiFi portals).
neverssl.com
Wish the admin never added the SSL redirect, its literally the namesake lol
I just want basically captive.apple.com with a shorter domain and the webserver not even listening on port 443 at all.
Surprised someone hasn't made this yet, it only requires one spare public IP.
They bullshit big time on that, I have caught them not once.
For a site with proven visitors 100,000 per month CF tell me they saved 90,000 over 1,000,000 visitors (rough numbers).
Sure they know large numbers make people feel good.
Cloudflare, enabling the problem and the solution since, how long has it been?
If this admin is serious about AI growth they’d make anti-scrapping illegal.
I don't think this admin even knows what scraping is. Unless it's "scraping the bottom of the barrel", something they're very familiar with.
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What does this new setting actually do? Does it block their IP ranges too, I hope? As if Meta, for instance, is actually going to respect Accountable, via themselves or their partners, quite frankly is eyebrow raising at best.
A bit too late honestly (?). With so many people who have shifted over to reading AI summaries as a primary search response, those with AI-enabled sites will win by attrition.
There is no going back from this. And the internet is a relatively new phenomenon. Recklessly, blindly applying ads to pages in hopes of generating revenue is a very silly thing to do. Technology with ad blockers and now AI summaries has taken that away. New business models, perhaps actually decent ones are required.
Death of ads everywhere? Good fucking riddance.
Posted from LibreWolf.
All this attitude does is tear down the only viable income source for independent publishers and demonizes them for trying to make money, while everyone let's huge corporations off the hook for it because "well that's just what they do"
Independent publishers can't afford to run an ad network.
You aren't independent. You work for the BigTech company that serves ads on your site.
Advertising in the way it’s done is demonic in and of itself. I don’t care - find a better business model.