Cloudflare and GoDaddy Roll Out New Controls for Bots and AI Agents
The partnership with GoDaddy focuses on giving website owners greater control over how AI systems access and use their data.
Cloudflare and GoDaddy have announced a strategic collaboration aimed at enabling a more transparent and secure “agentic web,” as artificial intelligence agents increasingly interact with online content.
Last year, Cloudflare announced the private beta launch of AI Index—a tool that automatically builds an AI-optimised search index for domains on its network.
The partnership with GoDaddy focuses on giving website owners greater control over how AI systems access and use their data, while also establishing standards to identify and verify AI agents operating across the internet.
“The Internet is evolving into a high-velocity, AI-driven ecosystem, and that requires a new kind of transparent infrastructure. By putting tools like AI Crawl Control and open standards into the hands of website owners, we are providing essential underpinnings for a new Internet business model.
"We want to ensure that every creator has the tools to verify who is interacting with their site, while giving legitimate AI agents a secure, transparent way to participate in a thriving open web,” Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare Chief Strategy Officer, said.
As the web evolves from a human-centric model to one that also supports autonomous agents, the companies said the lack of clear standards risks exposing businesses and creators to unverified or malicious bot traffic.
To address this, GoDaddy will integrate Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control into its hosting platform, allowing users to manage how AI-powered crawlers interact with their websites.
Beyond access control, the initiative emphasizes identity and trust. GoDaddy has introduced the Agent Name Service (ANS), an open standard designed to provide consistent naming, verification, and discovery of AI agents using domain name system (DNS) and public key infrastructure (PKI).
“By working with Cloudflare on AI Crawl Control and championing the Agent Name Service, an open standard giving every agent a verifiable identity built on DNS, we are providing our customers the transparency they need to thrive in an AI-first world. We move at the speed of the Internet, and we're working with the broader industry to ensure the agentic open web does too,” Jared Sine, GoDaddy Chief Strategy Officer, added.
Cloudflare is also supporting ANS alongside its Web Bot Auth technology, which uses cryptographic methods to verify bot and agent traffic.
Together, these tools aim to establish a permission-based framework for the agentic web, enabling website owners to allow, block, or monetize AI access to their content. The companies also aim to support AI-driven commerce by ensuring agents can securely identify themselves when making transactions or data requests.
Recently, Cloudflare announced the launch of EmDash, a new open-source content management system (CMS) developed as a modern, secure alternative to WordPress. The platform is currently available in early developer preview.
