Cloudflare's program also gives them the flexibility to charge some bots while letting other bots scrape for free. This lets publishers that have negotiated deals with AI companies to allow approved scraping while still protecting their content from companies that have not yet struck licensing deals.

Major publications have already signed up, including Ziff Davis, The Atlantic, ADWEEK, BuzzFeed, Time, O’Reilly Media, Internet Brands, and more.

Cloudflare’s new model is an attempt to put the control of online content back into the hands of its original creators and owners. It follows a similar attempt by Creative Commons, which recently unveiled a new framework meant to compensate creators when their work is used for AI training.