Cloudflare's Block setting now stops Google, Bing and Apple search too, and here is the setting that does not

Cloudflare says Block and Block on pages with ads now apply to mixed-use crawlers, "so either setting impacts search as well as training." A new Disallow AI Training setting is the one that refuses training while keeping search.

September 21, 2026 · 2 min read

Cloudflare has changed what one of its bot-blocking switches does, and the change reaches search.

The old problem, in Cloudflare's words, was that an owner had to "allow your content to be used for AI training, or risk losing discoverability in search." That is because some crawlers are mixed-use: "a single crawler serving both search and AI training." "Refuse one, and you refuse the other."

Cloudflare's answer is a new Disallow AI Training setting, and the post says "Apple, Google, and Microsoft honor or have committed (in a specified time frame) to honor this setting."

The part to check is what happened to the old switch on September 15: "Block and Block on pages with ads now apply to mixed-use crawlers, including Applebot, Bingbot, and Googlebot, so either setting impacts search as well as training." Pick Block today and, per the same page, "It will stop Applebot, Bingbot, and Googlebot from reaching your site" - search included.

Here is how to fix it. Cloudflare's own answer to what owners must do is "Nothing, in almost every case", because "Your current settings carry over on their own." The one setting worth opening is Block. The replacement instruction is a single line: "To stop training and keep search, use Disallow AI Training." The controls are "available to all customers, on all plans," at the domain Security Settings.

For scale, from the same post: "less than 1% of Cloudflare sites choose to block Search bots", while "17% of sites choose to enable some mechanism to block training."