Patreon, the membership platform for creators, has tightened measures to prevent AI systems from scraping its content for model training. On Thursday the company said it is working with internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to directly block AI bots that harvest creators’ work without permission.
Why the change?
Patreon said the stronger measures were necessary because AI scraping became more sophisticated after the platform first implemented crawler-deterrent steps in 2023. While Patreon’s paywall historically kept much creator content out of reach for crawlers, recent features — including a redesigned Home Feed and short, tweet-like “Quips” — could surface more material to external crawlers.
Cloudflare tools and Pay Per Crawl
Cloudflare has been offering tools that let publishers restrict AI bots. Among these is a marketplace that enables websites to charge AI bots for scraping, called Pay Per Crawl. Earlier this month Cloudflare also changed its policies so that “mixed-use” crawlers — those that both index and train on a site’s content — are blocked by default on pages that host ads.
What Patreon is doing now
Patreon said it is extending its work with Cloudflare to use Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control technology to update its AI policies and enforcement. The key shift is moving from asking crawlers to respect rules in robots.txt files to actively blocking AI training bots.
Patreon’s blog post put it plainly: “Consent shouldn’t depend on whether a scraper chooses to behave.”
Results and exceptions
In tests, the company reported that weekly access attempts by individual AI training crawlers dropped from “thousands of attempts to zero,” indicating many scrape agents had ignored Patreon’s robots.txt and scraped the site anyway.
The company also said it will still allow bots that index pages and organize information in ways that can send users back to Patreon.
Why this matters for creators
Drew Rowny, Patreon’s product chief, said in the announcement that as AI agents become more powerful and popular, creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies. He noted that on much of the internet creators currently have to accept AI training on their work just to reach and grow an audience, and described Patreon’s different vision: creators should be able to grow their audience while controlling how their work is used.
The move is part of a broader trend among publishers and creators seeking greater control and protection over how AI systems ingest and reuse their intellectual property.
