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Introducing pay per crawl: Enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access (blog.cloudflare.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/webdev@programming.dev
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Pay per crawl is a new feature to allow content creators to charge AI crawlers for access to their content.

Pay per crawl grants domain owners full control over their monetization strategy. They can define a flat, per-request price across their entire site. Publishers will then have three distinct options for a crawler:

  1. Allow: Grant the crawler free access to content.
  2. Charge: Require payment at the configured, domain-wide price.
  3. Block: Deny access entirely, with no option to pay.

Although this is old news, I still found it interesting. Also, I like the "AI Labyrinth" feature of Cloudflare to block AI bots.

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[–] 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Cloudflare seems to live in a world where AI scrapers are ethical and lawful.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago

    And apparently profitable. These companies are essentially buying their shit based on clout, not actual possessed monetary value. I’m struggling to see how that could translate into whatever system Cloudflare thinks they will engage with.

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    • [–] 5 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    PPC actually sounds quite reasonable

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    • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    what if youlre not trying to train ai? What if you just want to update a personal dashboard/archive?

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    Well, cockmushroom, then you're building a pretty expensive dashboard. I still don't see how they are going to differentiate between normal browsing and bot crawling. I don't think that's an exact science.

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