Cloudflare blocked 416 billion requests from AI bots trying to scrape data from websites, thus protecting content creators.

Cloudflare has announced that it has blocked 416 billion requests from AI bots attempting to scrape data from its clients' websites since July 1. Co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince emphasized that these protective measures are changing the way online content is accessed and could alter the web economy. Cloudflare provides tools that automatically filter traffic from bots, resulting in the blocking of over 416 billion data scraping attempts. Prince explained that the traditional economic model of the internet is disrupted by generative AI, which collects and reuses content without redirecting users to publishers, leading to traffic and revenue losses for creators. Prince criticizes Google's approach, which has merged its search indexing bot with its AI training bot, forcing publishers to choose between blocking AI bots and losing search traffic. Cloudflare emphasizes the importance of separating these bots to allow websites to control access. Prince also highlighted Google's advantage regarding access to web pages, which gives it a dominant position in searches and AI.