Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince didn’t make his biggest AI announcement in a press release or earnings call. He made it one X reply at a time.
Earlier this month, Cloudflare launched what it called “Content Independence Day,” a policy change that blocks AI companies from scraping the websites it protects unless they compensate content creators. The move challenges the decades-old web economy where companies like Google could freely index content in exchange for traffic, and replaces it with a new, much tougher standard: no more crawling without a deal.
But the real story is what happened next.
In a series of unfiltered X (formerly Twitter) replies over several days, Prince revealed that Cloudflare is already treating some AI giants as violators, signaling a dramatic power shift in who sets the rules of the web.
One of the most notable admissions? “Gemini is blocked by default,” Prince wrote on July 3, referring to Google’s AI model. In other words, Google’s AI agents are no longer welcome to freely ingest data from websites protected by Cloudflare unless Google complies with new rules or pays.
That’s a huge deal. Cloudflare protects roughly 20% of the web, including major publishers, media outlets, and creator platforms. If it cuts off AI crawlers from those sites, the large language models that power today’s chatbots, AI summaries, and answer boxes could go hungry.
A major sticking point for publishers has been Googlebot, Google’s main crawler, which traditionally indexed content for search. Now, Googlebot is also used to feed data to Google’s AI models, including its new AI Overviews and the Gemini LLM (Large Language Model) that powers many of its generative AI features. This dual role creates a conflict of interest for creators who want to appear in traditional search results but not have their content used for AI training without compensation.
Prince made it clear that Google’s current practices won’t be allowed under the old terms. “We will get Google to provide ways to block Answer Box and AI Overview, without blocking classic search indexing, as well,” he wrote. If not? “We have a number of other ways to force them to.”
Translation: Cloudflare, a company once known for protecting websites from DDoS attacks, now sees itself as a watchdog for the AI economy, and it’s not afraid to flex.
Gemini is blocked by default. We will get Google to provide ways to block Answer Box and AI Overview, without blocking classic search indexing, as well.
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 3, 2025
But a user pushed back on the technical feasibility of this: “Is that possible? Are ai overviews not a representation of the search index ranking itself – isn’t most rag?” “Rag” refers to Retrieval Augmented Generation, where LLMs pull from indexed data. Prince’s curt, confident reply: “It is. #staytuned.” This hashtag hints that Cloudflare believes it has the technical chops to separate AI driven summaries and features from standard search indexing, something Google has thus far been unwilling or unable to offer publishers.
It is. #staytuned
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 3, 2025
Prince’s tone is diplomatic but unmistakably firm. He says he is “encouraged from conversations with them.” But he also hints at enforcement tools if Big Tech doesn’t cooperate.
“Worst case we’ll pass a law somewhere that requires them to break out their crawlers and then announce all routes to their crawlers from there. And that wouldn’t be hard. But I’m hopeful it won’t need to come to that,” he said in another post.
Worst case we’ll pass a law somewhere that requires them to break out their crawlers and then announce all routes to their crawlers from there. And that wouldn’t be hard. But I’m hopeful it won’t need to come to that.
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 7, 2025
The idea of Google being “forced” to adapt is a powerful statement coming from a company that doesn’t dictate web standards, but effectively controls a significant portion of its traffic. Prince’s confidence underscores Cloudflare’s unique leverage.
Prince isn’t alone in sounding the alarm. One X user asked about blocking Amazon’s AI crawler, Nova. Prince responded by acknowledging “conflicts of interest with the hyperscalers and their AI efforts,” a reference to how companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft run both AI services and massive infrastructure backbones.
Prince’s comments go further than most CEOs in tech have dared. While others issue vague calls for “AI safety” or “fair licensing,” he’s laying out the next steps. First: stop the crawlers. Second: build a marketplace where AI engines pay creators not for traffic, but for value, or how well their content fills knowledge gaps in AI models. Think of it as SEO for the post-search web.
Technically speaking, Cloudflare can enforce these rules by identifying AI user agents, basically the software labels that crawlers use, and blocking them automatically unless allowed. For instance, it can block Gemini (Google), Claude (Anthropic), and ChatGPT (OpenAI) from accessing content unless a publisher explicitly whitelists them.
It’s not a perfect system—companies can spoof crawlers, and not all bots identify themselves—but it’s a powerful signal. And with billions of pages under its watch, Cloudflare is now in a unique position to shape the future of AI training data, one firewall rule at a time.
Prince’s posts reveal that the rules of engagement are shifting in real time. AI companies, once used to quietly hoovering up the web, may soon need to negotiate publicly, transparently, and on creator-friendly terms.
In short: Cloudflare wants to protect the very idea that content has value. Think of Cloudflare as a massive, intelligent security guard and express delivery service for your website. When someone tries to access your site, their request often goes through Cloudflare’s global network first. Cloudflare can then block malicious traffic, speed up content delivery, and, crucially, identify and control specific types of automated bots, like AI crawlers, before they ever reach your website’s actual server. In the emerging AI arms race, that makes Cloudflare one of the most important gatekeepers on the internet.
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