Patreon, the membership platform used by over 250,000 creators, announced Thursday it is actively blocking AI training bots from scraping its content, moving beyond the passive requests it relied on since 2023. The company is working with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to enforce the blocks using Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control technology.
“Consent shouldn’t depend on whether a scraper chooses to behave,” Patreon wrote in a blog post announcing the stricter measures. The company said that during testing, individual AI training crawlers’ weekly attempts to access Patreon went from “thousands of attempts to zero,” indicating that the scrapers had been ignoring Patreon’s robots.txt file and scraping the site anyway.
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From polite requests to active enforcement
Patreon first put measures in place to deter AI crawlers in 2023, using the standard robots.txt protocol that asks bots politely to stay out. But the company says AI scraping has become more sophisticated since then, and passive requests proved insufficient. The paywall that locks much of Patreon’s creator content behind member-only access has long provided some protection. However, the company recently introduced new discovery tools including a redesigned Home Feed and Quips — tweet-like short-form posts — which could expose more content to crawlers.
Cloudflare now offers a suite of tools for website publishers to restrict AI bots, including a marketplace dubbed Pay Per Crawl that lets websites charge AI companies for scraping access. Earlier this month, Cloudflare changed its policies so that “mixed-use” crawlers — those that both index pages and train AI models on content — are blocked by default on any pages that host ads.
What this means for creators and AI companies
Patreon’s move comes as online publishers and content creators increasingly grapple with how AI companies are ingesting their work to train models. The distinction between indexing for search and training for AI has become a flashpoint across the web. Patreon says it will continue to allow bots that index pages and organize information that can send users back to the platform, but will block those that train AI models.
“As AI agents become increasingly powerful and popular, creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies,” said Drew Rowny, Patreon’s product chief, in the announcement. “On most of the Internet, creators have to accept AI training on their work just to reach and grow an audience. Patreon has a different vision: creators should be able to grow their audience and control how their work is used.”
The approach represents a significant shift in how platforms can enforce consent. Instead of relying on AI companies to voluntarily respect robots.txt — a system that depends on good-faith compliance — Patreon is now using technical enforcement at the network level. The company’s partnership with Cloudflare means blocks are applied before a scraper’s request even reaches Patreon’s servers.
Other platforms are watching closely. The broader publishing industry has been testing similar approaches, with some major news organizations blocking OpenAI’s GPTBot and other crawlers. The question now is whether Patreon’s enforcement-first model becomes the new standard for creator platforms, or whether AI companies will find ways around the blocks as they have with robots.txt.
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