The news: Cloudflare is rolling out a new feature that gives content publishers greater control over how Google scrapes and presents their content and helps them keep content out of AI summaries without opting out of Google search results all together—a choice Google hasn’t allowed.

Zooming out: Opting out of Google search results could devastate traffic and revenues. AI Overviews can also cut referral traffic by as much as 25%, per Digital Content Next.

In response, companies like Cloudflare are introducing pay-per-crawl and pay-per-inference models, hoping to push AI-driven companies like Meta and Google to compensate publishers when content is used to train chatbots or fuel AI summaries.

Yes, but: If Cloudflare’s new tool is simply an update for robots.txt files—a line of website code that tells web crawlers what content they can or cannot scrape—it’s not legally binding. Tech companies could opt to ignore Cloudflare’s restrictions and continue gathering content as usual.

Why it matters for CMOs: Beyond traffic concerns, the rise of AI summaries can raise questions about visibility, brand control, and the value of content. Marketers are being driven to rethink content strategies and pursue generative engine optimization (GEO) as search platforms prioritize generative AI (genAI) outputs over direct referral links.

Other pressure on Google’s AI: Microsoft is focusing on another aspect of AI outputs and reportedly launching a two-sided publisher marketplace, per Axios, that would compensate publishers when their content is used or indexed by Copilot.

• As the first major tech company to establish such a program, Microsoft could force Google’s hand to follow suit.
• While Copilot commands far less monthly traffic than ChatGPT or Search, its Microsoft 365 parent platform has a built-in audience of about 430 million enterprise clients, per The Information.

Our take: For publishers, Cloudflare’s and Microsoft’s offerings could provide further control over how content is indexed and brands are compensated. Experimenting with the tools will help companies understand how AI summaries are affecting their traffic and searchability.