[News] Beehiiv’s new Cloudflare partnership gives indie journalists a new level of control over AI crawlers

Beehiiv has teamed with Cloudflare to give independent newsletter creators granular control over AI crawlers that scrape content for large language models. Through a new dashboard, Beehiiv users can opt in or out of specific AI agents, view detailed metrics on which bots access their newsletters, and automatically receive updates as new crawlers appear. This beta‑only AI Crawl Control service offers more precise on‑platform management than the honor‑based robots.txt approach used by Substack and Ghost. The partnership is part of Cloudflare’s broader push to let publishers block AI scrapers by default and monetize access via a “pay‑per‑crawl” marketplace—though Beehiiv creators won’t directly tap that revenue stream. Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk said the tools let writers balance discovery with protection, giving them leverage as AI reshapes content consumption.