Cloudflare Introduces Pay-Per-Crawl for AI – Will It Impact SEO?

Now Cloudflare is planning to charge AI bots to access your content. That means, now content owners can charge AI Crawlers for the access of the website.

How AI model work?

Al crawlers or bots go to any website read the content of the websites, summarize all the information and provide the answers as per there understanding without letting you know the original user name, source or content information. Collecting all the information without any charges. AI was getting all the useful information or highly informative content from the web for Free.

Because of these AI models organic searches are going down, traffic of the websites are going down, sales are going down. It harms the Google organic searches a lot from few months now.

After analyzing the AI approach, Cloudflare comes in with the new Idea called “PAY-PER-CRAWL”

Here’s the Quotes by Cloudflare CEO – Publishers facing existential threat from AI 

How Cloudflare’s Pay-Per-Crawl works?

Moving out from the traditional way, Cloudflare introduced pay-per-crawl model and send a setback to AI models from getting a free information.

Now you can Allow, Charge or Block any AI model.

that means?

With the help of Cloudflare dashboard, website owners will able to add three rules to there websites for every specific AI bot or crawler –

Allow – It will allow all the crawlers to crawler the website without any payment with HTTP 200
Charge – It will charge the crawler with “Required Payment per Request HTTP 402”
Block – It will block crawler to access your website, but still you may add hint for the payment can be bargained in the future.

Now with the help of Pay-Per-Crawl AI bot can’t able to get the free information from the website

Have a look at the snapshot by Cloudflare, It shows the relevant information how to set the crawling permissions.

                                                                                                                                 Source – Cloudflare

Will Pay-Per-Crawl Affect SEO?

No, It will not affect SEO at all. This model is meant to blog only AI bots or crawlers including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Meta AI, Chatsonic, GitHub Copilot, Pi, Watson Assistant, Intercom, Tidio, Zendesk, Botsify, Replika, Zapier and many more.

It will work list the same way for SEO, Cloudflare will not block BingBot, Googlebot, or any other search engine crawlers by default.

So you don’t need to worry about it.