Cloudflare AI Crawl Control and BotConsent solve different layers of the same problem.
Cloudflare can help sites analyze, block, or monetize AI crawler access at the infrastructure layer. BotConsent helps website owners draft, publish, and monitor the policy layer those controls should point back to.
Important: BotConsent is independent. It is not partnered with Cloudflare, OpenAI, Google, or any AI company.
Where Cloudflare fits
Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control documentation describes tools to monitor AI services, set crawler access policies, monitor robots.txt compliance, and explore Pay Per Crawl. Cloudflare's bot documentation also covers managed robots.txt behavior and Content Signals-style fields such as search, ai-input, and ai-train.
Where BotConsent fits
BotConsent is the policy workflow around those decisions. It helps you decide and publish plain-language terms for questions like:
- Should search indexing remain allowed?
- Should AI assistant retrieval be allowed when it cites or links back?
- Should AI training be blocked unless there is a license?
- Should commercial scraping route to a paid-access inquiry?
- Where should crawlers find the canonical policy page?
Recommended workflow
- Use BotConsent to generate your preferred policy posture.
- Review generated robots.txt and policy language internally.
- If you use Cloudflare, compare your BotConsent policy to Cloudflare's AI crawler controls.
- Publish the canonical policy page and reference it from robots.txt or llms.txt where appropriate.
- Use BotConsent monitoring to check that your public policy remains complete.
Pay Per Crawl readiness
Cloudflare's Pay Per Crawl beta uses a paid-access model in which crawlers may receive HTTP 402 Payment Required responses with pricing details. Even if you are not using that beta, it is useful to prepare a public licensing path now: who can request access, what uses require permission, and which policy URL governs content use.
Suggested policy copy
Commercial use, bulk extraction, dataset creation, AI model training, or paid crawler access requires prior written permission unless another agreement applies.
Search indexing is allowed when crawlers respect published directives and return users to canonical source URLs.
The canonical AI crawler policy for this site is published at https://example.com/botconsent.Limits to state clearly
A published policy is not the same thing as enforcement. robots.txt compliance is voluntary, and bad bots may ignore directives. BotConsent helps document permissions, prepare technical signals, and monitor readiness; it cannot guarantee crawler compliance and is not legal advice.