Content Independence Day: no AI crawl without compensation!

Cloudflare, with a majority of the world's leading publishers and AI companies, is changing its default so that AI crawlers are blocked unless they pay creators for their content, a change the article says takes effect July 1, which it calls Content Independence Day. The article argues that the traditional search-driven deal, in which Google copied content in exchange for traffic, has broken down as AI answers replace clicks. It states that content creators now face 750 times more difficulty getting traffic from OpenAI and 30,000 times more difficulty from Anthropic than from the older Google, compared with the roughly tenfold drop attributed to Google's own changes. Cloudflare says it will next build a marketplace and score content by how much it fills gaps in AI engines' knowledge rather than by traffic.