Quick Answer: Starting September 15, 2026, Cloudflare's new default settings will block AI Training and Agent crawlers on ad-supported pages, applying to new domains, new sites on existing accounts, and any Free-tier account that has not changed its settings. Because Googlebot crawls for both Search and AI training in a single bot, sites that block Training will also block Googlebot on those pages unless they explicitly opt out. If your site runs on Cloudflare and you want AI citation without losing Google Search visibility, review your zone Security settings before the deadline.
If your site sits behind Cloudflare and you have ever enabled a setting meant to block AI from Training on your content, there is a real chance you are about to block Google along with it, not because of anything you did wrong, but because of how Google built Googlebot.
Cloudflare announced on July 1, 2026, that starting September 15, new default rules will treat crawlers that serve more than one purpose, search indexing and AI training combined, under whichever rule is most restrictive. Googlebot is exactly that kind of crawler, and so are Applebot and Bingbot.
What Changes on September 15
Cloudflare now sorts AI-related crawler traffic into three categories instead of a single AI-or-not toggle. Search crawlers index content to answer questions later, the traditional crawl-and-rank behavior sites have allowed for decades. Agent crawlers act in real time on a person's behalf, the kind of bot a live ChatGPT or Claude session uses to pull a page mid-conversation. Training crawlers collect content in bulk to build or fine-tune a model, with no immediate user-facing task attached.
On September 15, new defaults take effect for domains onboarding to Cloudflare, for sites added by existing customers, and for all Free-tier accounts that have not changed their settings. Under those defaults, Training and Agent crawlers are blocked on any page that carries advertising, while Search crawlers remain allowed.
The part that matters most is what happens to crawlers that do more than one job. Cloudflare will apply the most restrictive rule that fits. A crawler that performs both Search and Training is treated as a Training crawler wherever Training is blocked. Googlebot, Applebot, and Bingbot all fall into that mixed-use category, since each one indexes for Search and feeds AI products from the same crawl.
Why This Matters if You're Doing Both SEO and AEO
Most brands investing in AI visibility right now are also still depending on Google Search for the bulk of their traffic. That combination is exactly where this change creates a bind. A site that enabled Cloudflare's legacy "Block AI Bots" setting to keep its content out of model training will, under the new rule, find Googlebot caught in that same block on any ad-supported page, since Cloudflare cannot separate Google's Search crawling from its AI training crawling within a single bot.
Google offers a separate directive called Google-Extended that lets site owners opt out of using AI Training without affecting Search inclusion, but it has real limits. Content excluded by Google-Extended can still surface in AI Overviews because Overviews draw directly from Google's Search index rather than a separate AI training corpus. The distinction between blocking Training and staying visible in Google's own AI features is narrower than most site owners assume.
Who's Affected
The new defaults apply to three groups: new domains onboarding to Cloudflare after September 15, new sites added by existing customers, and existing Free-tier customers who have not changed their settings by that date. Paying customers on existing sites keep their current configuration unless they change it themselves.
That distinction matters for triage, since if your site is on a paid Cloudflare plan and you have not touched your bot settings recently, you are not automatically affected on September 15. You should still check, because the legacy "Block AI Bots" toggle that many sites enabled last year now falls under the new mixed-use rule, and a setting that felt safe when it launched may behave differently once the new classification logic applies.
What to Check Before September 15
Open your Cloudflare zone Security settings and look for the AI traffic controls covering Search, Agent, and Training categories. Confirm whether Training is currently blocked, and, if so, whether the block is narrowly scoped or inherited from the older "Block AI Bots" toggle.
Decide deliberately whether you want Googlebot, Applebot, and Bingbot treated as Search crawlers or swept into your Training block. If you want AI citations without losing Google Search visibility, you likely want Search allowed and Training blocked so you do not accidentally catch mixed-use crawlers. Cloudflare's dashboard lets you set this per category rather than as a single switch, so the fix is usually a configuration change, not a tradeoff you have to accept.
The Bigger Pattern Behind This
This is a reminder that SEO, AEO, and GEO are not separate settings you configure once and forget. They are layered on the same infrastructure, and a change made to protect one layer can silently damage another. A brand that locks down AI training access without checking what else that lock touches can lose search visibility while believing it only closed off model training, and never notice until traffic drops months later with no obvious cause.
Check This Before You Move On
September 15 is not far off, and the fix here is usually a few minutes in a settings panel, not a strategic overhaul. The risk is not that this change is complicated, but that most site owners will not know to look until search traffic drops and nobody connects it back to a crawler setting configured months earlier for a completely different reason.
If you want a second set of eyes on how your infrastructure choices affect both search and AI visibility, that cross-layer audit is part of our approach to SEO, AEO, and GEO. If you want to know whether your content is currently being cited or quietly filtered out of AI answers, the AEO Index can show you where you stand.