Infrastructure Market: Cloudflare introduces new controls for search crawlers, AI training, and agents.

Cloudflare is introducing new controls that let website operators separately decide whether their content can be used for traditional search, AI training, or AI agents. This aims to resolve the trade-off between being discoverable in search and protecting content from being used to train AI models. The company is replacing its 'Block AI Bots' toggle with three independent settings, including a 'Disallow AI Training' option. It is also introducing an 'Accountable' status for AI crawlers, which requires them to support independent opt-outs for AI training and search. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are already compliant or have committed to a timeline. Additionally, Cloudflare is replacing 'Managed Robots.txt' with 'Bot Preference Sync' for centralized control and is working on an open standard called 'ai-prefs' for expressing site preferences.