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Cloudflare Blocks AI Crawlers by Default, Strengthening Nation Media Design’s Google Cloud Hosting

Caleb Nation

Lead Project Manager

August 1, 2025

What you'll learn?

Cloudflare’s AI blocking and security tools protect Nation Media’s Google Cloud sites.

Read time:

7 Minutes

Cloudflare Blocks AI Crawlers by Default, Strengthening Nation Media Design’s Google Cloud Hosting

Cloudflare DDoS protection

Cloudflare, which now powers roughly 20% of all web pages, recently announced major new measures to protect online content seroundtable.com. Notably, Cloudflare will block AI web crawlers by default for new sites on its platform, preventing bots from scraping content without permission. This shifts the status quo – content scraping is moving from an automatic opt-out (where sites had to actively block bots) to an opt-in model controlled by the content owners seroundtable.com. Alongside this, Cloudflare is introducing a “Pay Per Crawl” program that lets publishers charge AI services on a per-request basis when those bots do access content seroundtable.com.

For Nation Media Design – which hosts its digital properties on Google Cloud and leverages Cloudflare’s protective network – these changes bolster an infrastructure already designed for security, performance, and resilience.

Cloudflare’s AI Crawler Block & Pay-Per-Crawl Model

Cloudflare’s decision to block AI crawlers by default means that any new website using Cloudflare will automatically fend off unwanted AI bots. Site owners would now explicitly grant permission to certain crawlers if they want to allow them, putting publishers firmly in control of their content techcrunch.com. Cloudflare touts itself as the first Internet infrastructure provider to enact this kind of default AI bot blocking across its network seroundtable.com.

Existing Cloudflare customers can achieve the same one-click protection via their dashboard, ensuring that even older sites can easily opt in to this safeguard seroundtable.com. In practical terms, this default setting gives every new domain “the default of control,” meaning web content won’t be accessed by AI scrapers unless the owner says so techcrunch.com. This is a big shift for the industry and a welcome change for content producers concerned about unauthorized data mining.

In tandem, Cloudflare’s new Pay Per Crawl marketplace adds another layer of control (and potential revenue) for content owners. This system enables publishers to choose exactly how AI bots interact with their sites: you can allow specific AI crawlers free access, block them entirely, or charge a fee (micropayments) for each crawl request seroundtable.com.

In essence, Cloudflare is giving site owners a menu of options – from full access to outright blocking or paid access – on a crawler-by-crawler basis. For example, a news site could permit a reputable AI to index its public articles for free, charge another AI service a per-page fee, and block all others. This granularity, backed by Cloudflare’s technology, puts content monetization and protection in the hands of publishers.

According to Cloudflare, these tools even let website owners see why a bot is scraping (e.g. for AI training data or search results) so they can make informed decisions about access techcrunch.com. Major publishers have embraced this approach – organizations like TIME, The Atlantic, ADWEEK, and Fortune are already on board with Cloudflare’s permission-based crawling model techcrunch.com. It’s clear that industry leaders see these protections as crucial for the AI era.

Nation Media Design's Secure & Resilient Google Cloud Infrastructure

DDoS Attack Mitigation

At Nation Media Design, we have architected our hosting environment to be secure, high-performance, and resilient by design.

Our websites and applications run on Google Cloud Platform for a reliable, scalable backend, and we integrate Cloudflare as a critical front-line defense and delivery layer. This Cloudflare + Google Cloud design means our clients’ sites benefit from the best of both worlds: Google’s robust cloud computing infrastructure and Cloudflare’s global edge network and security suite. In fact, Cloudflare provides a comprehensive set of security and performance services that protect Google Cloud–hosted sites (like ours) from DDoS attacks, data breaches, and malicious bots, while also accelerating content delivery and ensuring availability cloudflare.com.

Essentially, every request to our sites passes through Cloudflare’s protective network before hitting our Google Cloud servers – illegitimate traffic gets filtered or blocked, and legitimate users are served from the fastest available location.

By leveraging Cloudflare extensively (as a sizeable portion of the web does), Nation Media Design ensures that threats are mitigated at the network edge, far away from our origin servers. For example, when Cloudflare rolled out the default AI bot blocking feature, Nation Media’ Design’s sites immediately stood to benefit – unauthorized scrapers and bots are stopped in their tracks before they can scrape our content or overload our systems.

Meanwhile, if we choose to monetize certain content for AI usage, the Pay Per Crawl option is available to integrate, potentially creating new revenue streams for our content in a controlled, opt-in way. These advantages underscore why Nation Media’s infrastructure is not just in the cloud, but enhanced by Cloudflare for maximum security and speed.

Defending Against Threats and Improving Performance with Cloudflare

Cloudflare’s platform adds multiple layers of defense to Nation Media Design’s cloud-hosted sites, shielding them from cyberattacks while also boosting site performance and uptime. Here’s how Cloudflare safeguards our Google Cloud environment against the biggest threats – and why this means a faster, more reliable experience for our users:

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks attempt to overwhelm websites with traffic, but Cloudflare’s network is built to absorb even the largest of these floods. With a massive 388 Tbps capacity (over 23× greater than the biggest DDoS attack ever recorded), Cloudflare can deflect attacks that would cripple most other networks cloudflare.com. All of Cloudflare’s DDoS protection is unmetered and always-on for sites on the service – there are no surprise charges or caps no matter how large an attack gets cloudflare.com.

In practice, this means that if a malicious actor tries to deluge a Nation Media Design’s sites with bogus traffic, Cloudflare’s global edge will soak up and block the attack before it ever reaches our Google Cloud servers. Our sites stay online and responsive, while the attack traffic never impacts our infrastructure. This unmetered DDoS mitigation is crucial for resilience, as it ensures that sudden surges – whether from legitimate viral traffic or malicious attacks – won’t take us down.

Web Application Firewall & Data Breach Prevention

To protect against hacking and data breaches, Cloudflare provides an enterprise-grade Web Application Firewall (WAF) and related security tools on the edge. Cloudflare’s WAF intelligently filters out malicious requests — such as SQL injection attempts, cross-site scripting, and other exploits — using continually updated rules. In addition, all traffic between users and our sites is encrypted with SSL/TLS 1.3, and Cloudflare supports DNSSEC to prevent DNS spoofing, ensuring users reliably reach our real site. These measures, combined with rate limiting and an IP reputation database, stop suspicious behavior before it can do harm cloudflare.com.

For Nation Media Design and our clients, this means sensitive data and customer information are safer. Even if someone tries to probe our applications for vulnerabilities, Cloudflare is inspecting those requests at the edge and blocking threats in real time. This significantly reduces the risk of data breaches or downtime due to application-layer attacks. Our Google Cloud backend is further hardened by only seeing traffic that has been vetted by Cloudflare’s security layer.

Bot Management and Scraper Protection

Malicious bots and scrapers constitute a large portion of internet traffic, ranging from content thieves to spam bots and vulnerability scanners. Cloudflare helps distinguish good traffic from bad by leveraging its vast network intelligence. It uses an IP reputation database and behavioral analysis to identify bots that are known to cause harm or violate rules cloudflare.com. Suspected bots can be challenged (e.g. via CAPTCHA or JavaScript challenges) or flat-out blocked, depending on our configured security level. The new default AI crawler blocking is one example of Cloudflare’s bot management in action – it prevents automated agents (in this case, AI data harvesters) from accessing content without approval.

For Nation Media Design’s sites, this means our content and APIs are safeguarded against unauthorized scraping, spam form submissions, and other automated abuse. Genuine users and well-behaved bots (like mainstream search engine crawlers) continue to access our sites normally, but malicious bots hit a virtual shield. By reducing bad bot traffic, Cloudflare not only improves security but also frees up server resources and bandwidth for legitimate users.

Faster Performance and High Availability

Beyond security, Cloudflare significantly improves the performance and availability of our websites. Its globally distributed Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches our sites content on servers in over 200 cities around the world, meaning users load pages from a location geographically close to them. This results in quicker page load times and a better user experience, whether you’re visiting a Nation Media Design site from New York, London, or Sydney.

Cloudflare’s network also optimizes routing (for instance, using Argo Smart Routing to find the fastest paths) which can boost delivery speed for dynamic content as well. Furthermore, Cloudflare provides local and global load balancing across servers cloudflare.com and boasts a 100% uptime SLA for enterprise customers cloudflare.com. In practical terms, that means our Google Cloud-hosted services remain highly available even if one data center goes down or if traffic spikes unexpectedly.

Cloudflare will seamlessly distribute traffic to keep things running. They also offer an “Always Online” capability that can serve cached pages if our origin servers were ever unreachable. All these features ensure that Nation Media Design’s infrastructure stays fast and online under virtually any conditions. The combination of Google Cloud’s reliable compute power with Cloudflare’s accelerated delivery and redundancy gives our clients and readers a consistently smooth, uninterrupted experience.

Conclusion

With Cloudflare’s latest protective measures and our robust Google Cloud architecture, Nation Media Design’s infrastructure is more secure and more powerful than ever. The ability to block unwanted AI bots by default and selectively monetize content access is a game-changer that enhances the control and security we can offer to our content creators. Meanwhile, the proven DDoS protection, WAF security, and bot management provided by Cloudflare continue to shield our sites from attacks day in and day out. Coupled with Cloudflare’s speed and uptime benefits, this means our clients’ sites can confidently handle both rapid growth and aggressive threats.

Nation Media’s Design’s philosophy is to join powerful cloud hosting (via Google Cloud) with world-class edge protection (via Cloudflare) – resulting in a hosting environment that is secure, high-performance, and resilient. As the web evolves with new challenges like AI crawlers and ever-larger DDoS assaults, we’re prepared to adapt and thrive by relying on trusted partners like Cloudflare to keep our platforms safe and blazing fast cloudflare.com.

In summary, Cloudflare’s innovations reinforce the strength of Nation Media’s infrastructure, ensuring we can continue to deliver content to users quickly, safely, and reliably.

Sources:
Cloudflare & TechCrunch news techcrunch.com
Search Engine Roundtable seroundtable.com
Cloudflare Google Cloud integration docs cloudflare.com