Who Gets to Crawl?

About the webinar:
As generative AI reshapes how information is discovered, retrieved, and reused, publishers are being forced to confront a more basic question: who gets to access their content, under what conditions, and for what purpose?

Cloudflare sits close to the infrastructure layer of this debate. Its network gives it a unique view of how AI crawlers, bots, search engines, and emerging agents are interacting with publisher sites in practice. That makes its data an important signal for understanding how the AI-mediated web is actually taking shape.

At the same time, Cloudflare is not only observing this shift. It is actively building tools and protocols that could influence the next stage of publisher control: from bot blocking and AI crawler management to content signals, pay-per-crawl experiments, and new ways of making web content readable for agents.

In this session, Sam Else, Senior Director Strategic Partnerships at Cloudflare, will share what Cloudflare is seeing across the web, how AI crawler behaviour is evolving, and what publishers can learn from the emerging infrastructure layer around bots, agents, protocols, and machine-readable rights.

Speaker:
Sam Else | Sr. Director, Strategic Partnerships: Media, Creators & AI, Cloudflare

Moderators:
Ezra Eeman | Lead, AI in Media, WAN-IFRA
Kevin Anderson | Director of the Digital Revenue Network, WAN-IFRA

—

The webinar is open to both members and non-members, will be held in English on Zoom, and will be recorded for internal reference. The recording and related content, including presentations, will be made available on the WAN-IFRA Knowledge Hub, our premier online resource exclusively for WAN-IFRA members.

Stay updated on AI in Media (AIM): www.wan-ifra-aim.org