07:41 AM EDT, 07/01/2025 (MT Newswires) -- Cloudflare ( NET ) said Tuesday it has rolled out a new tool using which website owners can prevent AI crawlers from accessing their content "without permission or compensation, by default."

AI companies can now "clearly" specify the use of their crawlers, be it training or search, such that website owners may choose which ones to allow, Cloudflare ( NET ) said, adding that AI companies will now require permission from a website before scraping content and even be potentially charged a "pay per crawl" fee.

AI crawlers gather content, including text and images, to generate responses, without sending visitors to the original source, Cloudflare ( NET ) added.