Cloudflare has launched a suite of tools designed to empower website owners to analyse and control how their content is used by artificial intelligence (AI) companies. The company's new offering allows website owners to set a fair price for AI companies that wish to use their content for training purposes.

Cloudflare claims the move is a first in the market, addressing the issue of AI crawlers scanning website content thousands of times daily without offering compensation or credit.

The new tools give website owners the ability to control how AI model providers use their content, choose how they can access it, and in the near future, receive fair compensation for their contributions to the internet. The tools include the ability to block all AI bots in one click, access analytics to understand why, when, and how often AI models access their website, and help in negotiating with model providers.

Over the next year, Cloudflare plans to help website owners determine the compensation they believe they should receive from AI model providers for the right to scan their content. The company has announced AI Audit, a set of tools to help websites of any size analyse and control how their content is used by artificial intelligence (AI) models. Cloudflare is developing a new feature where content creators can reliably set a fair price for their content that is used by AI companies for model training and retrieval augmented generation (RAG).

"AI will dramatically change content online, and we must all decide together what its future will look like," said co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare, Matthew Prince. "Content creators and website owners of all sizes deserve to own and have control over their content. If they don't, the quality of online information will deteriorate or be locked exclusively behind paywalls. With Cloudflare's scale and global infrastructure, we believe we can provide the tools and set the standards to give websites, publishers, and content creators control and fair compensation for their contribution to the Internet, while still enabling AI model providers to innovate."

Existing Cloudflare customers can access the AI Tab from their dashboard today to review analytics for their sites and start controlling bots now. Cloudflare is on a mission to help build a better internet, empowering organisations to make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost.