"The new change, which Cloudflare calls its Content Signals Policy, happened after publishers and other companies that depend on web traffic have cried foul over Google's AI Overviews and similar AI answer engines, saying they are sharply cutting those companies' path to revenue because they don't send traffic back to the source of the information. There have been lawsuits, efforts to kick-start new marketplaces to ensure compensation, and more-"
"Almost every reasonable AI company that's out there is saying, listen, if it's a fair playing field, then we're happy to pay for content," Prince said. "The problem is that all of them are terrified of Google because if Google gets content for free but they all have to pay for it, they are always going to be at an inherent disadvantage."
Cloudflare updated millions of websites' robots.txt files under a Content Signals Policy to influence how Google crawls and uses web content for AI products. The change responds to publisher concerns that AI Overviews and answer engines reduce referral traffic and revenue by delivering answers without sending users back to original sites. Cloudflare's infrastructure supports roughly 20 percent of the web, giving it leverage to pressure Google and affect indexing and model training. The move aims to create a fairer marketplace for content usage and compensation by prompting search and AI companies to negotiate access or alter crawling practices.
Read at Ars Technica
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