Cloudflare is one of the most widely used pieces of internet infrastructure: it acts as an intermediary between a website and the people who visit it —including AI bots—, speeding up load times and protecting the site from attacks and malicious traffic.
What does it do?
When a user visits a site, in many cases they don’t connect directly to the origin server: they first pass through Cloudflare, which:
- Speeds up page loading through geographically distributed servers (CDN)
- Protects the site from attacks and malicious traffic (DDoS, malicious bots)
- Lets you define which bots can access the content and which can’t —including AI training bots
Why it matters in the context of AI
Cloudflare announced a rule change, in effect since September 15, 2026, that lets each site distinguish between bots that index for search (like Google) and bots that train AI models or feed assistant answers like ChatGPT or Claude —with the option to charge for access to that content. It’s a structural shift in how artificial intelligence will be able to access information published online. Read more about this in the article AEO: Why Your Business Needs to Show Up in AI Answers.
How we apply this at PENDZIUCH
In the projects we build —websites, apps, PWAs and custom systems— we use Cloudflare as an infrastructure layer: domain registration and management, attack protection, and explicit control over which bots can access each project’s content. It’s part of how we make sure a client’s infrastructure is secure, fast, and ready for the new AI-access standard.