Patreon Blocks AI Crawlers at the Network Level

Patreon announced July 16, 2026 that it is using Cloudflare's AI Crawl Control to block AI training crawlers at the network layer, replacing a passive robots.txt approach in place since 2023. Weekly crawler access attempts dropped from thousands to zero in testing. Search indexing bots remain permitted. Product chief Drew Rowny said "creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies."