Helping protect journalists and local news from AI crawlers with Project Galileo

On 23 September 2025, Cloudflare announced that Project Galileo will now include access to Bot Management and AI Crawl Control services, enabling participants to protect their websites from AI crawlers for free. The programme, which includes roughly 750 journalists, independent news organisations, and other non-profits supporting news-gathering worldwide, expands Galileo’s free offering to help protect civic voices online.

Cloudflare notes that Project Galileo launched in 2014 and now covers more than 3,000 organisations in 125 countries, underpinning other free programmes that support democratic elections, public schools, and critical infrastructure. Cloudflare’s Bot Management identifies good versus bad bots, while AI Crawl Control helps owners analyse crawler activity and decide which data to share, on a crawler-by-crawler basis.

The company cites data showing AI crawlers such as OpenAI and Anthropic substantially dampen traffic, with OpenAI making it 750 times harder to obtain the same traffic and Anthropic 30,000 times harder, and quotes from Internews Europe and LION emphasising the value of affordable tools for independent publishers.