We will not go quietly into the AI night: What Cloudflare’s ‘AI Independence Day’ could mean for CMS

Independence Day destroyed the box office in the summer of 1996. It was a bona fide Hollywood blockbuster, ushering in a decades-long fascination with large-scale disaster and sci-fi films.

I was there when it opened. I remember sitting in a chilled theater, a sticky layer of Coke-infused popcorn crunching beneath my feet, holding my breath as mile-long flying saucers cast long shadows across entire cities. 

What happened next was the stuff of VFX legend: Manhattan melted under a massive laser. F-14 Tomcats picked dogfights with alien spaceships. There were heroes and sacrifices. It was all visually glorious. 

If you haven’t seen this masterpiece, there’s a big spoiler ahead. The film reaches its climax on the morning of July Fourth, just as Earth’s ransacked military is launching a final assault against these technologically advanced invaders. 

As he’s rallying the troops for a final speech, President Whitmore (played by the ever-gruff Bill Pullman) says:

“We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight…”

Man. I still get goosebumps.

Appropriating this iconic holiday was a clever plot mechanism, but it also illustrated how a crisis can unify people around a common cause. In the movie, mankind is on the line, and “Independence Day” transcends its American roots, symbolizing a victory for the entire planet. 

It feels like our world could use a dose of that unifying spirit right now, but I digress. 

Digital publishers have also been experiencing an “invasion” by advanced technology. For the last few years, AI crawlers have been infesting the web, harvesting content and repurposing it for answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. 

According to one study, more than half of Americans use one of these chatbots to search and navigate the web. As people continue to shift their preferences to these tools, zero-click searches are destroying traffic and, consequently, punishing content creators. 

To understand why this is happening, we have to go back to the dawn of Google, when it established not only its dominance in search, but also the business model for the web. By allowing the “Big G” to crawl and index your site, you effectively traded content for eyeballs. Search generated traffic, which publishers could value against the sale of digital ads, subscriptions, and other merchandise. You get the rest.

The entire model is changing, and Google is partly to blame. Setting aside its nefarious ad practices that resulted in an antitrust lawsuit, Google’s infamous AI Overview has cannibalized organic search traffic from websites by answering queries directly. 

At the same time, the total number of Google searches is declining, and last year, 60% of them ended without a click. In 2025, we could be looking at some dystopian-level declines.  

Where does this leave content creators? If there’s no traffic, how can they translate the value of their website and the experiences they produce? And If AI crawlers continue to invade, pillage, and assimilate their content, where’s the incentive to keep producing the quality work that powers the web?

Cloudflare declares ‘Content Independence Day’ 

When deconstructing this AI conundrum, fighting an advanced alien technology might not be the perfect analogy, but it rings some truth. To be fair, AI is astonishing, and it’s having a profound and often positive impact on the way we work. It’s also helping to solve some of the biggest problems we face, from fully unlocking our genomes to accelerating a cure for cancer.

But for the creator and knowledge economies – where generative AI and co-pilots have evolved beyond automating tasks to outright deprecating jobs – it’s been a double-edged sword.

Now, Cloudflare is attempting to fight back with what it calls “Content Independence Day.” The cloud infrastructure provider just announced that it’s changing its default setting to block AI crawlers unless they agree to pay creators for their content. This, of course, requires the employment of Cloudflare as a CDN, but it's a “full stop” moment.

As co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince wrote in his announcement on July 1, content is the “fuel” that powers AI engines. In his mind, it's only fair that content creators are compensated directly for it.

This move has a lot of weight behind it. As one of the largest networks on the planet, Cloudflare serves roughly 20% of the web with its cloud infrastructure services, which include content delivery, DDoS protection, load balancing, bot management, and more. 

In the announcement, the company suggested that it was being joined by a “majority of leading publishers and AI companies." This likely includes media outlets like The New York Times, which has been publicly embroiled in lawsuits with OpenAI and Microsoft over content copyright infringement. It’s also worth noting that many large publishers like The Atlantic and Vox have already struck deals with AI companies to license their content for AI model training.

This news isn’t exactly shocking. Cloudflare has been laying the groundwork over the last year, giving publishers an array of tools for battling the onslaught of AI crawlers. But the path is leading to what Prince describes as a “marketplace” where publishers can choose to provide access to AI bots and be compensated for it.

This week, Cloudflare took the first step in launching its new “Pay per Crawl” vision, which is in the experimental phases. It works just like it sounds: A website owner can choose to allow individual AI crawlers to index their content for an agreed-upon rate. Alternatively, websites can allow free access or block bots altogether. According to Cloudflare, its customers will have enhanced visibility into how a specific bot is using their content for things like model training.

There’s no word yet on what that pricing model will look like, but Cloudflare is endeavoring to put choice fully in the hands of content creators and publishers. It’s asserting what Seth Godin might call a “permission-based methodology,” where the actions are transparent, the intentions are in the sunlight, and the user has the power. Overall, that sounds healthy. 

In his blog post, Prince also talked about the shift to a new paradigm for scoring and valuing content. Since the beginning of Google, we’ve been hyper-focused on traffic as the end-all, be-all of analytics. As he proposes, this could be a tipping point – a new “golden age” of high-value content creation – that bridges the knowledge gap for AI engines and improves results. 

Is he right? I’m honestly not sure. Cloudflare is working with experts and economists to map this new marketplace and provide some guidance. There’s already been a swell of positive support for this move, so I’m betting we’ll see traction and adoption over the coming months.

The real question is: How will the AI providers adapt? Will they all board the mothership?

What this could mean for the CMS industry

Independence Day painted a terrifying picture of how advanced alien technology could wreak havoc on our planet. But it also demonstrated how human ingenuity – and a mastery of our own tools and technologies – could help us turn the tide. 

As the engines for content publishing, content management systems are at the foundation of this fight. Nearly every commercial and open source CMS vendor is deploying with a CDN or offers native content delivery controls. That’s even true on the managed open source side (think about how easy it is to flip on a CDN in WP Engine). 

If Pay per Crawl catches on, there could be a shift of preference towards Cloudflare. Likewise, other CDNs that offer bot management (Akamai and Fastly come to mind) might also introduce default AI blocking. To that end, we can expect increased scrutiny on CDN partnerships and edge technologies.

It’s too early to know how this will all play out, but CMS vendors, customers, and practitioners should keep a weather eye on this storm. In the same manner that regulation has galvanized the rights of website users regarding data privacy, this could result in a free-market solution that insulates content creators from the yoke of AI crawlers and provides fair compensation. 

As the New York Times said, it’s like a toll road, and bots finally have to pay the piper. As a publisher, they've been vocal and audacious about fortifying their content domain, because the leap to digital hasn't exactly been an easy or profitable transition. AI is just the latest threat to their content-driven model. 

As Cloudflare suggested, this could ultimately coalesce in a new marketplace, one where the crawler economy collides with the agentic. As the company outlined, agents could be given “budgets” to hunt down the best and most relevant content – and even leverage an industry-specific stablecoin or token system to transact with. 

CMSes could become key instruments in this, providing control planes and vectors for how bots can engage with content. If website owners have visibility into the kinds of bots hitting their pages, they can be strategically selective and use permission-based methodologies to allow access. The CDN layer might be the core control point, but the CMS could help simplify that. Via analytics, content creators could also identify which pages are higher-value targets, and thus worth more to a bot.

Headless CMSes and composable DXPs might be better positioned to adapt to this new marketplace by leveraging APIs for fine-tuning crawl exposure. We could see the injection of native crawl budgeting or cost-governance tools, as well as dashboards that monitor a variety of dimensions and dynamic indexing based on analytics. This is all pie-in-the-sky, but the potential is ripe for innovation.

At the center of this is content strategy, which will likely continue a shift towards “value per crawl.” It’s still all about optimization, but we should expect even smarter tools to help improve site structure and schema – and in this sense, the fundamentals are still sound.

There’s a lot more I could speculate on, but it doesn’t change the simple fact that AI needs content, and websites need traffic. Maybe it’s time that there’s a fair transaction between the two. This move is attempting to marry performance with transparency and financial accountability, and CMSes that offer more control could have an advantage.

We don’t need to blow up the world to solve this problem, but declaring an “Independence Day” might be a good start. And Cloudflare might be in the best position to help content creators "not go quietly into the AI night.'"

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