Patreon partners with Cloudflare to block AI training bots by default

Patreon, the membership platform for creators, is shifting from asking AI scrapers not to train on its content to actively blocking them. The company is working with Cloudflare to enforce these blocks using Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control technology. Patreon says the change is necessary because AI scraping has become more sophisticated since it first implemented robots.txt restrictions in 2023.

The platform’s paywall already restricted much of creators’ content from crawlers, but recent discovery features such as a redesigned Home Feed and Quips could expose additional content to scrapers. To address this, Patreon is adopting Cloudflare’s enforcement tools, which allow publishers to restrict AI bots and, in some cases, charge them for access via a marketplace feature called Pay Per Crawl.

Cloudflare updated its policies this month so that ‘mixed-use’ crawlers—those that both index and train on a website’s content—are blocked by default on pages that host ads. Patreon states that after testing the new enforcement, weekly attempts by individual AI training crawlers to access its site fell from thousands to zero, indicating that prior robots.txt requests were being ignored.

Patreon’s product chief Drew Rowny said in an announcement that as AI agents become more powerful and popular, creators deserve meaningful control over how their work is used by AI companies. The company argues that many creators currently have to accept AI training on their work to reach and grow an audience, and that Patreon aims to provide an alternative where creators can control usage of their content.