A rolling back mechanism is the best thing to have for server tweaks. I achieve the same with docker. Something similar might be possible with FreeBSD Jails, podman, or anything similar like that. (Not that NixOS is a bad choice, I just wanted to share some more options for anybody looking for some to try.)
But the article later does back it up: "Although Cloudflare singled out Google, other search engines that view AI search features as part of their search products also use the same bots for training as they do for search indexing."
In any case, I'm okay with admitting neither you nor me can look inside Google to see they're doing. But the claims are out there, I didn't make them up, whether they're true or not. Thank you for the certainly interesting Google crawler info link.
The page seems written to perhaps suggest it but doesn't explicitly say the other bots can't feed into some other sort of AI training. It would be in Google's interest to mislead the users here.
Edit: I found a quote where it says Googlebot does both in one: "Google-Extended doesn't have a separate HTTP request user agent string. Crawling is done with existing Google user agent [...]" and I guess Cloudflare doesn't trust Google to abide by the access controls. That seems sensible to me. Edit 2: What exactly the CEO believes was perhaps rightfully disputed below, it was just my guess.
Often it is respected, but the resulting problem is platforms conflate things with the questionable AI scraping crawlers to blackmail websites into participating in feeding AI.
Until regulation steps in to require AI bots to separately ask for crawling permission, or to actually get a proper license for reuse of the contents, this situation isn't going to improve.
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