Patreon blocks AI bots after robots.txt ignored
patreon moved from robots.txt requests to active blocking via cloudflare after observing thousands of ignored scraping attempts, signaling a shift toward hard enforcement to protect creator revenue.
patreon abandoned passive 'robots.txt' directives for active blocking via cloudflare's ai crawl control technology after detecting thousands of weekly scraping attempts that ignored its requests. while the platform strictly prohibits ai training bots, it explicitly permits indexing bots that help users discover content, distinguishing between traffic-driving search and data-harvesting training. this move reflects a broader industry trend where platforms like cloudflare introduce tools such as 'pay per crawl' to monetize or restrict access to proprietary data. as ai agents proliferate, patreon's strategy aims to grant creators leverage over their work without sacrificing audience growth.