A week or so ago, Cloudflare announced it would block AI bots by default and offer a new pay per crawl initiative to compensate you all for your content that AI just consumes for free. But as most SEOs know, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews can't be blocked without really blocking your site from Google Search.
But the CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, believes Google will give them a way to block AI Overviews and Answer boxes without being forced to block class search indexing.
He wrote on X, "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."
Here is that post:
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
I mean, we've all been asking Google to give us this level of control. In which Google says, no, or you can use nosnippet controls but that will also impact your Google Search results in some ways. So there really isn't a clean way to block your content from being used in AI Overviews or AI Mode while being fully safe with ranking in the main Google search results.
I am not sure how Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, is so confident he will get Google to give him a way to do this.
It is. #staytuned
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 3, 2025
Do you think Cloudflare will be able to get Google to do this?
Forum discussion at X.
Update: More from Matthew Prince on how they will get Google to 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.
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 7, 2025
I’m encouraged from conversations with them. But that very viable option we have many legislators in many jurisdictions lined up to pass if they don’t.
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 7, 2025
