Cloudflare shipped a "disallow AI training" setting that keeps you in search, and certified Apple, Google and Microsoft as accountable.

The September 15 control breaks the mixed-use bind where one bot both indexes for search and scrapes for training. Operators earn Accountable status by meeting four requirements: a real opt-out, page-level transparency into training data, a guarantee that opting out doesn't hurt search rank, and AI-summary controls. Apple, Google and Microsoft passed; non-compliant crawlers get blocked while the preference is published in robots.txt. Cloudflare's framing number: 17% of sites already block training in some form, against under 1% that block search bots.