Patreon stops asking AI bots not to scrape — and starts blocking them
TechCrunch AI Sarah Perez
Patreon is now actively blocking AI training bots from scraping creator content using Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control technology, replacing its previous reliance on robots.txt requests. During testing, weekly scraping attempts from individual AI crawlers dropped from thousands to zero, showing that bots were previously ignoring Patreon's instructions. The platform aims to give creators control over whether their work is used to train AI models, while still allowing bots that index content and direct users back to the site.
Why it matters
Patreon is strengthening its defenses against AI scraping by working with Cloudflare to block bots that train AI models on creators’ content without permission. The move marks a shift away from relying on websites using robots.txt alone to actively block unauthorized AI training.
