Cloudflare and GoDaddy have struck a partnership aimed at giving website owners more say over how artificial intelligence systems access online content, while also backing new standards designed to verify the identity of AI agents. The agreement comes as publishers, developers and small businesses wrestle with a web increasingly shaped by automated systems that can scrape, summarise or act on information without clear attribution.

Under the deal, GoDaddy plans to build Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control into its hosting platform, allowing customers to decide whether AI crawlers can access their sites, whether they should be blocked, or whether payment is required. The companies say the aim is to move away from a largely open-ended model of automated access and towards a permission-based approach that gives site owners clearer control over how their material is used.

The partnership also reaches beyond crawler management into the harder question of agent identity. GoDaddy is supporting the Agent Name Service, or ANS, an open standard intended to make it easier to name, verify and discover AI agents using existing internet infrastructure such as domain names, DNS and public key infrastructure. Cloudflare is meanwhile backing ANS alongside its Web Bot Auth framework, which uses cryptographic verification to help distinguish legitimate automated traffic from impersonators. Cloudflare introduced Web Bot Auth in 2025 as part of a broader push for a more transparent agent-driven web.

The companies argue that identification alone is no longer enough, because the next phase of the internet will involve AI systems not just reading content but also making requests and, in some cases, carrying out transactions. In that environment, they say, verifiable identity could become important for everything from data access to autonomous purchases. The deal also reflects a wider concern among content owners that the rise of AI-generated answers is weakening the traditional traffic-based economics of the web, leaving them seeking new ways to preserve value and compensation for original material.

For GoDaddy, the move extends its role as a major provider to small businesses and creators who may have limited technical resources to manage bot traffic on their own. For Cloudflare, it reinforces a position it has been building around bot management and internet trust. Together, the companies are presenting the partnership as part of the infrastructure for what they call the agentic web: an online ecosystem where AI systems can be identified, governed and, when necessary, charged for access.

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Source: Noah Wire Services