If you host your website through GoDaddy, you now have a control panel feature that did not exist yesterday.
GoDaddy announced it is integrating Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control tool directly into its platform, giving millions of small business website owners the ability to decide how AI bots can access and use their content. You can allow them in, block them, or tell them to pay.
This is not a hypothetical future capability. It is available now, through your GoDaddy dashboard.
Here's what it means and how to think about whether to use it.
What AI Crawlers Are Doing to Your Website
Before the "should I block them" question makes sense, you need to understand what these crawlers are doing.
Every major AI company runs bots that scan the public internet. OpenAI has one called GPTBot. Google has one for its AI products. Anthropic has Claude-Bot. Perplexity has its own. They visit your website, read your content, and use that content to train or inform AI models. They do this without asking you, without paying you, and without sending you any traffic in return.
If you have written anything of value on your website, it is almost certainly being read by these bots regularly.
The argument for caring: your content, your recipes, your service descriptions, your blog posts, your how-to guides -- you created that. AI companies are monetizing it inside products that charge $20 a month per subscriber. You get nothing.
The argument for not caring: blocking the bots might make your business invisible to AI-generated answers. As more people ask ChatGPT for recommendations instead of Googling, the businesses that get cited in those answers get customers. The ones that block crawlers might get skipped.
Both arguments are real. Neither cancels the other out.
What Cloudflare's Tool Actually Does
Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control lets you do three things:
1. Allow crawlers: The default. AI bots can access your site the same as always. Your content gets used to train models.
2. Block crawlers: You can block specific AI bots, all AI bots, or configure them individually. A bot that you've blocked cannot read your site. This protects your content from being scraped without compensation.
3. Request payment: The most interesting option. Instead of blocking a crawler outright, you can send a "402 Payment Required" response that includes a custom message. This is how you create a communication channel with the AI company. You are not automatically getting paid -- you are signaling that you want to negotiate.
Cloudflare's framing, which is honest: they are trying to break the stalemate between content creators and AI companies. Right now the choice is block or let them take it. The 402 option introduces a middle path.
Why GoDaddy Is a Big Deal
Cloudflare's tool has existed in some form since 2025. What changed this week is GoDaddy.
GoDaddy hosts millions of small business websites. Their customer base is not tech companies with in-house engineers. It is bakeries, law offices, yoga studios, consultants, and local service businesses. By embedding AI Crawl Control into GoDaddy's platform, Cloudflare just made this decision accessible to a huge part of the small business internet that would never have set it up on their own.
This is a policy shift disguised as a product update. The more small business owners who engage with these settings, the more pressure it puts on AI companies to develop actual licensing infrastructure.
What You Should Actually Do
Here is the honest read on each option:
If your website is mostly a contact page, service list, and basic business info: The crawlers getting your hours and phone number is not harming you. Blocking them might make your business slightly less likely to appear when AI recommends businesses in your category. Probably leave it alone.
If your website has real content you created: How-to guides, industry expertise, original writing, tutorials, recipes, detailed processes. You have a legitimate interest in protecting this. At minimum, you should know these bots are reading it. Blocking them or requesting payment is a reasonable position, not a paranoid one.
If you depend on AI search visibility for customers: This is the trade-off you need to think about carefully. Blocking crawlers protects your content but may reduce how often AI products cite your business. There is no clean answer here. Most content creators are choosing not to block for now while keeping an eye on whether that changes.
If you are curious and want to monitor: Cloudflare's tool also shows you which AI bots are visiting your site and how often. Even if you do not change any settings, that data is worth looking at. You will probably be surprised how often your content is being read.
How to Access It
Log into your GoDaddy account. The AI Crawl Control integration is being rolled out through Cloudflare's partnership with GoDaddy's hosting platform. Look for it in your hosting control panel or domain security settings. If it is not visible yet, it is being phased in and should appear within weeks.
If you already manage your site through Cloudflare directly, the same controls are available in your Cloudflare dashboard under AI settings.
The Bigger Picture
The internet runs on an implicit deal: search engines crawl content, send traffic back, and everyone benefits from the exchange. That deal worked reasonably well for 25 years.
AI broke it. These systems absorb content at massive scale and return very little traffic. A news site or a specialist blog that trained an AI model gets no credit, no payment, and often no citation. Users get the answer inside the AI interface and never click through.
Small businesses are now downstream of that problem. The GoDaddy integration will not fix the underlying economics. But it is the first point at which millions of small business owners can say, at a minimum: I see what you are doing, and I have a choice.
Whether to flip the switch is genuinely a judgment call. But knowing the switch exists is a start.
Sources: The Verge coverage of GoDaddy and Cloudflare AI Crawl Control integration, April 7, 2026; Cloudflare AI Crawl Control announcement and blog post