Cloudflare: Bot blocking fuelling publisher AI deals | Charity sites hit by Google AI answers

Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Monday, 17 August.

❌ Cloudflare is one of the big beasts of the internet world and is on a mission to crack some heads together in the AI scraping world.

I spoke to chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen about the thinking behind its pay-per-crawl and now pay-per-use plans and why its efforts to block AI bots are following through on helping publishers make licensing deals (with outcomes vouched for by People Inc CEO Neil Vogel).

At Press Gazette’s AI Summit in London in June, we heard concerns that blocking the bots doesn’t always functionally mean blocking the bots - as there are so many ways for them to get through without you explicitly letting them.

I put that to Stephanie and she was insistent that Cloudflare’s blocks are clever and effective, and if publishers are getting scraped they may have leaky buckets elsewhere (for example by syndicating content to other websites that allow the bots).

I’d be interested to hear if this rings true for our newsletter readers. Feel free to drop me a line with your response to this story on charlotte.tobitt@pressgazette.co.uk.

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👩‍⚕️Press Gazette has previously reported on how health coverage is the publisher topic most vulnerable to losing traffic as a result of Google AI Overviews and the rise of ‘zero-click’ searches.

We have now confirmed this is also directly impacting charities that look after people in their worst times. Several health charities told us website traffic had fallen as people got information from AI answers instead of their trusted, accurate pages.

The encouraging thing, however, is that people appear to still be seeking out other humans via forums and other engagement-led pages, and that donations continue to come through. Once people have worked out what they need, they arrive at charity websites with a clear purpose in mind so hopefully it really is just eliminating that first-level query.

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🗣️ Finally, it’s less than a month until our biggest annual gathering, the Future of Media Technology Conference, kicks off in London.

We’ve now announced a whole raft of speakers led by Financial Times CEO Jon Slade as keynote speaker.

The Times, The Guardian, The Economist, BBC Studios, the Daily Mail, Conde Nast, Politico UK and Hello! Magazine are among the newsbrands that will be represented on stage.

Find out more, including how to get tickets, here.