Cloudflare might be hiding your site from ChatGPT

Cloudflare announced an important change that takes effect on 15 September 2026, and if you use the platform you need to keep an eye on it.

Before the change itself, a bit of context: last year Cloudflare tried a more radical approach, either you blocked every AI crawler or you charged for each crawl, the famous Content Independence Day. The problem is that the market moved in another direction. Now, a year later, the proposal has changed: instead of all or nothing, you get to control each type of crawler separately.

With this update, AI training crawlers will be blocked by default on pages with ads. And there is one very critical detail: crawlers that do more than one job, such as Googlebot, which indexes your site and trains Gemini, will be handled by the strictest rule.

So if you block training bots, you may end up blocking Googlebot without meaning to, and your site can fade from Google over the long run 😬

If you want to stay out of the new default rules, you need to opt out before the 15th, in the Security settings.

• Open the Cloudflare dashboard and click your domain.
• In the domain Overview, on the right hand side, there is a "Manage AI bot access" section.
• There you will find "Block AI training bots", with three choices: block on all pages, block only on pages with ads, or do not block.

If you want Googlebot and other search engines running without trouble, pick "Do not block (allow crawlers)" 🙂

All in all the direction is positive, but it pays to spend a few minutes making sure your settings are right before it goes live.