Can Cloudflare (NET) Become the Gatekeeper of the AI Web?

On September 15, Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE:NET) announced its new Accountable designation for AI crawling alongside the launch of "Disallow AI Training." This tool allows website owners to block AI models from scraping their content for training purposes while remaining fully indexable in traditional search results. Addressing the dilemma where publishers were forced to choose between search visibility and protecting intellectual property, Cloudflare established compliance criteria for crawler operators. Major tech players including Apple, Google, and Microsoft have achieved or committed to the Accountable framework. Mixed-use crawlers failing to comply face network-level blocks if a site owner enables the training block.