Worried about your work being used without permission by AI models like OpenAI, Meta AI, or Google Gemini? If your content is hosted on a website you control, Cloudflare’s new AI Audit tool could be a valuable resource. Here’s how to try it out.
Recently, some people have claimed that AI is generating my articles. But the truth is a little more complicated. Over the years, I’ve written nearly 15,000 articles, five books, and hundreds of white papers. When you add all of that up, I’ve written approximately 12 million words—half a million of which are about Linux and open-source technology.
So, where do you think AI learned about this technology? From my work, of course. And how much have OpenAI, Meta AI, and Google Gemini paid me for this? Not a penny.
To address this, Cloudflare has introduced AI Audit, a tool that helps website owners track and control how AI bots interact with their content. This tool allows you to monitor exactly how and when bots access your content and for what purposes.
AI Audit provides comprehensive analytics, including:
- The frequency of AI bot visits to your site
- The times at which these visits occur
- The purpose of the bots’ activities (such as data scraping or content generation)
- The specific pages or sections being accessed the most
This detailed information allows content creators to make more informed decisions about how they want their work to be used by AI systems.
The tool also offers a simple, one-click option to block all AI bots from accessing your site. This feature gives you immediate control over your content, allowing you to assess the bots’ impact on your traffic and business.
For even more precise control, AI Audit lets you:
- Differentiate between types of AI bots (e.g., those that give credit to sources vs. those that don’t)
- Access tools to help protect your rights when negotiating with AI companies
- Gain advanced analytics on crawling rates, especially for specific pages or sections of your site
The AI Audit feature is available to Cloudflare customers through their dashboard and integrates seamlessly with the company’s global infrastructure to provide these auditing capabilities across the web.
If you’re interested, you can join the AI Value Tool Waitlist to be among the first to try it out. Cloudflare will share more technical details at its upcoming Builder Day Live Stream on September 26 at 11 AM PT.
Looking ahead, Cloudflare is working on additional features, including a pricing mechanism that will allow website owners to set fair fees for AI companies looking to access their content for training or retrieval-augmented generation. This feature aims to facilitate smoother transactions between creators and AI companies, helping ensure that content creators are compensated for the use of their work.
As Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince explained, “AI will dramatically change content online, and we must all decide together what its future will look like. Content creators and website owners of all sizes deserve to own and control their content. Without this, the quality of online information could deteriorate or be locked behind paywalls.”
Prince’s point is important: If creators don’t take steps to protect their work, it will likely be consumed by AI systems. In fact, platforms like LinkedIn already use personal data by default to train AI models, and it’s not always easy to opt out. Meta has been doing this for years as well, making it intentionally difficult for users to prevent the use of their content.
As privacy activist Thorin Klosowski pointed out, many companies deliberately add barriers to make opting out harder because they know users won’t take the time to find these settings.
This is why Cloudflare’s AI Audit tool is so promising. While it doesn’t offer protection for content on social media platforms, it could be a game-changer for blogs and other smaller websites that lack the leverage to negotiate deals with AI companies. Major media companies, like Condé Nast, can sell content to AI companies, but smaller creators don’t typically have that option—until now.
Cloudflare is a significant player in the internet infrastructure space. By offering an easy way to block bots and set up a mechanism for AI companies to pay for content, this tool could help creators protect and profit from their work without needing to be tech experts or professional negotiators.
Personally, I may not get rich off of this, but it would be nice to see some tangible benefit from the AI companies using my work—beyond the occasional misguided comment accusing me of automating my content creation.