publisher controls

The publisher controls tag covers Cloudflare’s planned approach to mixed-use AI crawlers accessing publisher content. The discussion focuses on a September 15, 2026 policy that would block these crawlers from ad-supported pages by default unless search engines, AI agents, and model-training systems identify their purposes separately. It also examines how publishers, sysadmins, and site operators using a CDN may manage automated access, permissions, and the relationship between discovery, content extraction, and monetization. This tag is relevant to readers following changes in crawler policy, AI traffic governance, and the emerging permission model for websites that publish content online.