Have it both ways: stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training
That tradeoff exists because some of the largest organizations on the Internet use mixed-use crawlers: a single crawler serving both search and AI training. Refuse one, and you refuse the other.Today, Cloudflare is announcing a new Disallow AI Training setting that lets you easily stay indexed for search while refusing to let that same crawler train on your content. Apple, Google, and Microsoft honor or have committed (in a specified time frame) to honor this setting.Mixed-use crawlers were the hard part of the training question.
- ▪That tradeoff exists because some of the largest organizations on the Internet use mixed-use crawlers: a single crawler serving both search and AI training.
- ▪Refuse one, and you refuse the other.Today, Cloudflare is announcing a new Disallow AI Training setting that lets you easily stay indexed for search while refusing to let that same crawler train on your content.
- ▪Apple, Google, and Microsoft honor or have committed (in a specified time frame) to honor this setting.Mixed-use crawlers were the hard part of the training question.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 4,993 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Cloudflare Blog |
| Canonical URL | https://blog.cloudflare.com/accountable-mixed-use-ai-crawlers/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:10:55 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-15T14:26:52.577Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-15T14:26:52.577Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 7GfJDhqnYg5n · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
BlogAIAI BotsBot Management+3Show 3 more tags6 TagsShow 6 tagsPost TagsAIAI BotsBot ManagementNetwork ServicesProduct NewsSecurityAll tagsMatching tagsNo tags found1.1.1.12FAAbuseAccessAccess Control Lists (ACLs)AccessibilityAccount TakeoverAcquisitionsAddressingAdvanced Certificate ManagerAdvanced DDoSAdvertisingAegisAEOAfricaAfroflareAgent CloudAgent Development LifecycleAgent ReadinessAgentsAgents WeekAgents Week 2026AIAI BotsAI GatewayAI SearchAI WAFAI WeekAI-SPMAlertmanagerAlways OnlineAMDAMPAnalyticsAnonymousAnti MalwareAnycastAPIAPI GatewayAPI SecurityAPI ShieldAPJCAppleApplication SecurityApplication ServicesArea 1 SecurityArgo Smart RoutingASCIIAsiaAthenian ProjectAtlassianAttacksAudit LogsAustinAustraliaAuthenticationAuthyAuto RagAutomatic HTTPSAutomatic Platform…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Cloudflare Blog.
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