Cloudflare Threatens to Cut Google Off from Their Publishers in Searches Due to AI Scraping
Cloudflare may cut off Google's search access to its publishers due to aggressive AI scraping, which degrades site performance and disrupts content publishing and comment moderation.
One of our big complaints about AI is that they steal our copyrighted content. On top of that, the intensity of site scraping is so high that even Cloudflare (and we pay pretty hefty monthly fees for their industrial-grade product), which has the best bot detection and blocking on the Internet, is having difficulty in this arms race. Readers may have noticed that from time to time, we have had to put up captchas to stop this theft. If we don’t, the degradation of performance results in time outs for admins and writers. That means we can’t put up new posts or free comments caught in moderation.