Cloudflare is rolling out Pay Per Crawl (1.Viewing)

Cloudflare is rolling out Pay Per Crawl, a new feature that allows websites to charge for crawlers like search engines and AIs to index their content. At first glance, it sounds like a win for publishers—but for the overwhelming majority of websites, it’s a traffic trap disguised as a revenue stream.

Read more: Why Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl Is a Trap for 99% of Websites

They should be paying us directly to crawl our sites, I am not in favour of AI or anyone crawling DN.ca and using it to train AI. A royalty of some sorts should be paid. I have put thousands of hours into DN.ca. Blood, sweat and tears and AI gets credit when a question is answered about ccTLD or .CA using DN data.

Amazing AI, it knows everything says the average client but members here have contributed to the content. The word contributed for AI is used loosely though because there is a difference in contributed and scraping the site for free.

Maybe cloudflare should offer free hosting to the private sites whose data is used without permission.

@GeorgeK and I have often touched on similar topics