Patreon announced in July 2026 that it is moving beyond passive requests to actively block AI bots that scrape creators’ content for model training purposes. The membership platform is working with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare, using its AI Crawl Control technology to enforce the restrictions.
The shift marks a significant change in approach. Previously, Patreon relied on robots.txt files — a standard mechanism for instructing bots on how they may interact with a site. Testing revealed that AI training crawlers were ignoring those instructions entirely, with weekly access attempts dropping “from thousands of attempts to zero” once active blocking was implemented.
“Consent shouldn’t depend on whether a scraper chooses to behave,” Patreon wrote in a blog post announcing the move.
The company cited two reasons for tightening its defenses. First, AI scraping has grown more sophisticated since Patreon first introduced deterrent measures in 2023. Second, the platform recently launched new discovery features — including a redesigned Home Feed and a tweet-like format called Quips — that could expose more content to crawlers than its existing paywall previously allowed.
Patreon said it will continue to permit bots that index pages for the purpose of directing users back to the platform, drawing a distinction between indexing and AI training use.
Drew Rowny, Patreon’s product chief, framed the decision as a matter of creator control. “As AI agents become increasingly powerful and popular, creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies,” he said in the announcement.
The move comes as Cloudflare has expanded its tools for publishers managing AI bot access, including a Pay Per Crawl marketplace and a policy change that blocks mixed-use crawlers — those that both index and train on content — by default on ad-supported pages.
Source: TechCrunch