Nothing on this page seems to contradict the article. But if I simply missed the part that does, I'd be happy to learn.
ell1e
joined 3 days ago
So what's the quote from the documentation that backs up your claim? The line "perform other product specific crawls" seems extremely vague by design.
And allowing the public crawler might also have it feed their AI: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/
See here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/ If you have a source that says it's false, I'd be curious.
Often it is respected, but the resulting problem is platforms conflate things with the questionable AI scraping crawlers to blackmail websites into participating in feeding AI.
For example, Googlebot if enabled won't just list you for search, but will also scrape your contents for Google's AI. Edit: see https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/cloudflare-wants-google-to-change-its-ai-search-crawling-google-likely-wont/ as source. I imagine LinkedinBot, given it's microsoft, will feed some other AI of theirs as well on top of the previews.
Until regulation steps in to require AI bots to separately ask for crawling permission, or to actually get a proper license for reuse of the contents, this situation isn't going to improve.
The page seems written to perhaps suggest it but doesn't explicitly say the other bots can't feed into some other sort of AI training. It would be in Google's interest to mislead the users here.
Edit: I found a quote where it says Googlebot does both in one: "Google-Extended doesn't have a separate HTTP request user agent string. Crawling is done with existing Google user agent [...]" and I guess Cloudflare doesn't trust Google to abide by the access controls. That seems sensible to me. Edit 2: What exactly the CEO believes was perhaps rightfully disputed below, it was just my guess.