Cloudflare Has Blocked 416 Billion AI Bot Requests Since July 1

As the large language models powering generative AI tools slurp up ever more data across the web, Cloudflare cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince said at WIRED’s Big Interview event in San Francisco on Thursday that the internet infrastructure company has blocked more than 400 billion AI bot requests for its customers since July 1.

The action comes after the company announced a Content Independence Day in July—an initiative with prominent publishers and AI firms to block AI crawlers by default on content creators’ work unless the AI companies pay for access. Since July 2024, Cloudflare has offered customers tools to block AI bots from scraping their content. Cloudflare told WIRED that the number of AI bots blocked since July 1, 2025 is 416 billion.

“The business model of the internet has always been to generate content that drives traffic [to a website] and then sell either things, subscriptions ...