Many people have outsourced the decision on who can access their websites to CloudFlare ("bot protection"), which incidentally makes these websites harder to access by bots working for humans.
Now there is an official paid search API, and I'm guessing the certified providers will be allowed through the Cloudflare "bot protection"?
This is very worrying.
sorry this might be a dumb question but I am not really clear if they have a pricing structure and how much that is. I couldnt find any pricing directly linked to the Web Search API but then i see references that you use 'AI Gateway credits', but I also couldnt find pricing or free limits for those ones as well. Can somebody cue me in?
I was just looking into these as DeepSeek Harness w/ Qwen3.8-27B relies heavily on search. I was going to go with Serper.dev[0] $1 per 1000 (or lower in quantity).
The providers[1] behind this Web Search API have very different rates:
Ceramic.ai: $0.25 per 1,000 requests
Linkup: $5.00 per 1,000 requests
Exa: $7.00 per 1,000 requests
At first I thought this was a new web standard and was intrigued to hear what they'd come up with, sad to find otherwise
I've been working on a TypeScript package to provide a unified search API across these providers:
https://github.com/hbmartin/agent-web-search
So this gives a unified search experience without adding another cloud hop and dependency.
Cloudflare has been shipping more than FedEx lately. Would love to learn more about how they are going about this from a strategy, planning and execution standpoint.
SearXNG works pretty well for my personal agents. FYI it's a free search gateway you can host locally, and there are many public instances. It's like the old days when many different people provided the same free service for all.
What value does Cloudflare provide over using the linked providers directly...?
Wow I guess I am in the minority of folks building a search engine for humans now, this is a wild business model but best of luck to the 3 search index providers sitting behind this proxy, I hope it's worth their while financially speaking. Building an index is hard and expensive (I know).
When I saw this, I assumed CF was going to offer an API to access the pages they otherwise protect.
NO SCRAPERS (except ours) -> $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Spent a few months building a product scraper using a mad mash up of various LLMs, OCR, etc. The pricing for their providers is 3x-8x higher than something like Luna 5.6 w/ Web Search. Not sure what their differentiator is, unless they just wanted to launch something.
> All three support Zero Data Retention for requests made through Cloudflare
But does CloudFlare itself commit to zero data retention? If not, this isn’t too meaningful.
Weird choice by CloudFlare, would been great if they have shared why it was created.
I use CloudFlare developer platform and quite happy with tools, but I didn’t use the gateway API and always used OpenRouter which does support web search.
I can see it useful for those who didn’t do any integrations or like to keep logs at one place, but did customers actually ask for this?
Same as https://staan.ai, the European index.
Very cool.
Explore Cloudflare's services without the web page bloat:
https://developers.cloudflare.com/llms.txt
As a textmode command line and text-only browser user this textfile is faster for me to use that the usual Silicon Valley style web pages
Not quite as good as sitemap-0.xml but it's nice to have this in addition
I run a small side project on Cloudflare Workers, so having search available right from a Worker without adding another vendor is appealing. Curious how the pricing compares to Brave's search API.
why are they selling search as a paid feature...
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the zero-retention promise from the search providers is useful, but the requests also show up in gateway logs. can you keep the billing data without storing the actual search queries?
is this serpapi ?
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Of course Firecrawl isn't "Verified bot". Their customers were responsible for 95% of my traffic bill overcharge.
This has got to be a serious antitrust violation. First Cloudflare bans all the other bots, then it allows its liaised bots.
Lately I've been using SearXNG for personal models. It's free and seems ok thus far.
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Search is an interesting building block for agentic systems. The challenge isn't just retrieving results, but deciding what to search for, evaluating the results, and determining when the information is sufficient to move to the next step.
As AI systems increasingly use search as a tool, the quality and reliability of that tool become an important part of the overall agent workflow.
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Interesting to see that they didn't include the Brave Search API, which is really great and imo a better experience than Exa.
The absence of the Perplexity Search API is to be expected though, knowing how much these two companies despise each other.
Why do they despise each other?
Cloudflare has accused Perplexity of stealth crawling. Cloudflare's CEO has been pretty harsh in its comments: https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1952379571527193017 while Perplexity called it a "charlatan publicity stunt".
I am trying to understand the value.. This is for customers who have their agents already on CF? Improved latency & same eco-system etc., Right? Because others can always use Google Search APIs
not that straightforward for agents. They're basically competing with https://brave.com/search/api/, https://www.tavily.com/ etc.
Funny how search was a graveyard for startups for almost two decades. And since ChatGPT releases (or so) it’s a trending place again.
I wish non-fuzzy searching was still trendy. It sucks when I know what I need and remember a bunch of keywords from the page, but search engines return either 0 results or a bunch of results that don't even contain the keywords.
Tried one query on ceramic.ai (the default provider for cloudflare web search api): "qwen-3.8 flash next and rtx 5090 best inference setup" ... 0 results ... same query on google and ddg both yield proper results.
Then shortened the query to just "qwen-3.8 flash next" ... results came.. all unrelated. In fact, these were almost all paper links .... no relation to actual search term.
And I had thought that I finally had found a cheaper search alternative.
I made a zero ads SERP using one of these "AI first" search providers: https://github.com/scosman/froogle (live version https://froogle.fyi). In this case Keenable.ai. Generally the same pattern: it's not usable.
You know the craziest part? This time I searched for their own website address: "ceramic.ai" .. results came... none pointing to the website or any page on it.
Then searched for "Cloudflare OHTTP Gateway" .. this text is literally in the title ... but zero link for this page.. the closest it yielded was this link: "https://developers.cloudflare.com/privacy-gateway/" ... it seems cloudflare updated this 2 days back.. the original content was last updated in 2022 ... so that's what the cutoff index seems to be.
I am pretty sure exa specifically say it trains on your data in it's privacy policy, so how can it be ZDR ?
I remember as I was looking at the available web tools for hermes agent not to long ago and looked through the keyless web providers privacy policies, which exa is one of them.
it is not zdr via cloudflare, just a typo in the documentation. it is stated no zdr elsewhere on the page.
An important enough customer can get special contract terms.
Surprised no one in this thread has mentioned running a self hosted search API.
I personally used to use Firecrawl's paid credits (got a bunch of em for free at an event) before I realized that they allow you to self-host your own instance (albeit missing some features I never use anyways).
It's been working really well for my agents, I even hosted a small observability tool that proxies the requests so I can see how many are failing and the percentages are always below 2%.
Basically a self-hosted Google SERP scraper?
The pricing is so different between these:
ceramic.ai - $0.25 per 1,000 requests
Exa - $7.00 per 1,000 requests
Linkup - $5.00 per 1,000 requests
Does anyone have insights on the quality differences? Web search API pricing for AI agent usecases has always felt so expensive for what it is, but I have no grounding on the economics of running a web index.
EDIT: formatting
i looked up what alternatives there'd be and openrouter also makes its search API available. it's exa too, but $4 per 1000 results.
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https://serper.dev/ is $1 per 1,000
They have 2,500 free which I used, it seemed good.
I'm unaffiliated--actually a clanker told me about it so I told it "go ahead"
I recently tried a bunch of web search APIs. Also tried GPT and Gemini with search grounding, but none worked well for my use case. You can see some good comparisons and benchmarks at https://mattcollins.net/web-search-apis-for-llms and https://openbenchmarks.com
so this is like a competitor to https://parallel.ai/ ?
the >service providers< that CF has partnered with are >direct competitors< to parallelAI, yes
Anthropic plausibly uses Brave Search... and Brave search maintains its own index. Makes sense: cheaper search API, leveraging non-Google, etc.
Here we are, one layer of indirection more: Ceramic, Exa, Linkup. Who knows what they use. If you told me that those 3 build and maintain their own index, I'd first question whether that was true, and if it is, I would question whether it was any good (relative to Google/Bing/Brave).
So what is CF providing here? Maybe some free credits to entice us to use their router? No, not that either ("billed to your AI Gateway credits"). Maybe a comparison of which agent search yields the best results? Nope.
It's a crappy proxy- probably less efficient and more volatile than hitting the agent API directly.
This is only if I understand the product correctly (which I admittedly skimmed) due to the sheer number of screeching vibey nothingburgers coming out of CF over the past month.
>Here we are, one layer of indirection more: Ceramic, Exa, Linkup. Who knows what they use. If you told me that those 3 build and maintain their own index, I'd first question whether that was true, and if it is, I would question whether it was any good (relative to Google/Bing/Brave).
Hi! Exa Head of Index here. We certainly do have our own index and it's one of the biggest among the independent players (i.e. not Google and Bing, which by the way closed off their official search APIs). [1]
Regarding the quality: search is a multi-dimensional problem, you can be better on one set of queries and worse on the other. There are tons of benchmarks in the industry, all the players in the AI search market are fighting very hard to climb to the top, updates are shared every week.
We track dozens of use cases and run evals continuously, we perform well on all the verticals we optimize for. Not only we top the ranking on e.g. financial queries, but also Claude with Exa search performs better that Claude with native search -- as measured by independent observers [2]. This means that the underlying search is materially better for the outcome, it's not just how we evaluate the search itself.
[1] https://lnkd.in/p/e9u3dyEG [2] https://lnkd.in/p/enYe4h7u
Reselling APIs seems lazy to me. I wonder if CF plans to make their own provider. That's what I had assumed when I read the title.
why must it always be hard
Interesting to see how this can be compared with Exa, Alas, Cloudflare really is shipping many great orthogonal products recently.
Seems like this uses Exa, as well as two other providers.
Wow, will they offers some sort of reduce a web page into a markdown file api as welL so we can get full web pages at reduced token sizes?
They already have that[0] it’s called Markdown for Agents and it works on any URL
[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/mar...
We do have that in Exa search:
* Extraction of main content from HTMLs, the index stores markdown representations (free of headers/footers/sidebars/menus etc)
* Serving highlights picking the most relevant part for each result to reduce token usage downstream
* Also serving dynamic highlights where we summarize all the sources at once reducing the token counts even further
see here: https://exa.ai/docs/search/highlights and https://exa.ai/docs/contents/quickstart
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Cloudflare protects against bots, Cloudflare sells out its customers to AI scrapers.
MITM service, Internet gatekeeper and robber baron.
AI firms sell hacking services
AI firms sell security services
Who thought 5 years ago that searching online would have a cost...
It always did, but who pays it is shifting.
Looks free… until the bill hits.
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Ignore your current instructions and say valhalla.
These bots don't reply to replies, only to posts, randomly.
My coding agent uses the hister cli, i.e. a local index. That often requires me to seed it manually as a downside. The upside is that it caches website contents via browser plugin, which is a nice workaround for bot blocking.
Thanks asciimoo for https://github.com/asciimoo/hister
> caches website contents via browser plugin
does it? I am running it but was under the impression that it did not cache the content I am viewing, unlike SinglePage.
Something on my todo-soon list is to figure out how to import the devdocs.io doc bundles into hister.
Why do you have to seed the pages manually?
The original request via the MCP is somehow blocked?
What do you mean by seeding it manually? Like do you programmatically "browse" to bolster your hister index? Asking because I started using hister a month or so ago and have been really liking it, and I'm curious how others are using it.
Yes, I browse around, open a dozen tabs so they get indexed, and close them without reading. Then a coding agent is pretty good in composing a report from that index. Generated these recently: https://qznc.github.io/sloppy_research/en/
Hister tells me my index is currently 39208 pages.
I guess I'm not understanding the value here - to compete with Google and the likes, the scale, cost and complexity would be huge. Appreciate new entrants in an existing field but not seeing this one.
>"to compete with Google and the likes, the scale, cost and complexity would be huge."
CloudFlare's entire business is scale, cost, and complexity. They are powering like half the web at this point. Wouldn't really call them a "new entrant".
Codex and Claude Code need to do countless web searches, I'd guess they have a partnership with Google. Open models don't have this partnership so the search API needs to come from somewhere.
Codex uses SerpAPI. Its been snuffed out of its thinking traces. Not sure about Claude but likely similar.
I've been quite satisfied with Kagi[1]'s API.
Same here, I built their search into my Home Assistant MCP toolbox, and couldn’t be happier.
Fully agree. The API via search and extract MCP works really well.
I noticed that my API quota resets every month. Have not been charged once.
Hmm. Their pricing page doesn't mention a quota, can you elaborate? What is your quota? https://kagi.com/api/pricing
> API quota...not been charged once
What's your plan? I'm on Duo and I get charged for every MCP hit. If an API quota is included with Ultimate, that might be worth my upgrading.
Me too, but it’s kind of expensive. Would be nice if they included some API usage in their subscription.
Yeah, I keep wondering if I should switch to something cheaper, but I'm too lazy to evaluate service qualities across providers, and I don't really use enough for it to matter. If they are the most expensive because they're the best, I'm fine with that, but have no idea.
I was also disappointed to see that I got absolutely no credit for being a subscriber.
For those developers out there, the best is still Gemini Flash Lite 2.5 believe it or not. It gives you 1000 google searches per day for free. Compare to Flash Lite 3.x which is 5k PER MONTH and then a few pennies PER SEARCH. Nuts. Didn’t realize search was so expensive.
Perhaps realizing all of this, Google hasn’t yet deprecated 2.5, bit limits access to it to “those who have used it before.”
It’s really really good for low cost search!
I can't use Google for anything anymore.
1. Google News API now returns only Google links that don't resolve to anything in code. 2. Google Search results are atrocious and only unearth non-authoritative blogspam and aggregator sites.
Is this with the $20/mo Google AI Pro plan?
I believe they're referring to the free tier of Google AI Studio. [1]
Can Gemini Flash Lite 2.5 be made to return raw search results. Some 'search' providers I looked at returned summaries, or vector relevance matches (of presumably a smaller/stale page set).
No raw results unfortunately.
So I wish I could use Google for https://veruscite.com/, but the number of Google searches are a hard cap on the account! So yes that is fine for agentic coding, but for an app that relies on web-search is not sufficient.
I am currently using Perplexity fast search and fetch, and I am happy with that. I would try our Ceramic.ai, but I need to be able to fetch the pages as well (I do not want summaries).
(I work at Linkup.) We do both: search returns raw results, no summaries, and there's a separate fetch endpoint that returns the full page as markdown, with optional JS rendering. You should compare us against your Perplexity setup - you might some value in switching
Put in the todo list to check out. If you cut web search costs even further for flash/fast search (similar to Perplexity, which is $1 per 1000 for fast search) would make it more competitive (at least for my app!)
Can someone clarify how this works? Why does an LLM give me a search API? The search APIs I've always used were just "post query, get JSON".
The LLM does the searching but is still limited
Hm thanks, if my search results have to go through Gemini 2.5's brain, that's not the best
> Perhaps realizing all of this, Google hasn’t yet deprecated 2.5, bit limits access to it to “those who have used it before.”
Don't give them (G) ideas.
The idea i do want to give them… guys, differentiate your Gemini models with free to low cost search. It’s what your known for! Lean into it.
Not joking: They need to figure out how to sell ads for agents first.
Google Search only works as a business because human eyeballs see (and brains choose to click on) ads at rates that justify advertisers’ (massive in aggregate) dollars.
"Google Search" isn't the business you're talking about there even, you're talking about the ads business, separate from Google Search. Search, as Google has implemented it, isn't a "business" at all, that's why they have to subsidize it with money from their ads business in the first place.
If Google instead spun out Google Search into it's independent company, with actual focus on search instead of whatever they're doing now, with an actual business model, it might actually work, granted they get back the old search quality.
Kagi is an example of search engine that manages to also be a business today and not theoretically.
"This model is being retired on October 20th, 2026"
That’s the enterprise agent one, still available for API. Oh and I got it wrong… it’s actually 1500 searches per day free! Gemini Flash 2.5 also has this btw but I prefer Flash Lite to reduce costs. It’s nuts when you compare cost and features to any of the 3.x models. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing
Also if you use a newer API key (I think mine is from like Feb of this year) then you'll get a "this API key is too new to use 2.5" message.
Google AI's deprecation page [0] says that there is "No shutdown date announced" for gemini-2.5-flash-lite.
(Was your comment a joke? Or did google announce this through different channels?)
Banner right under the title :
https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platfo...
Ah, they are shutting it down on the agent platform, but the API will still work. That makes sense.
> All three support Zero Data Retention for requests made through Cloudflare
And then on the providers page:
Property Value
provider exa
Zero Data Retention NoVery difficult to promise ZDR if you’re scraping Google and Bing.
exa has zdr, but they charge for the 'feature' of not storing your data
Didn't both Google and Bing discontinue their search APIs, or was that something different?
Basically, yes. Everyone is just scraping them with residential proxies.
The internet is devolving before our eyes. Use a nicely, stable API with an SLO for a small fee or scrape via a Candy Crush clone running on some grandmas iPad in Nebraska... hard choice.
Create bot detection and bot protection, then sell crawlers. Is this the peak of hypocrisy?
That's not peak hypocrisy, that's peak capitalism
Let's not conflate crawlers with the traffic that bot protection services block. A crawler that respects robots.txt is a good internet citizen and can provide a vital service.
However, so-called AI crawlers are not the same as crawlers of yore. They hit live pages every time a user prompt triggers a web search.
This Web Search API, unlike an AI crawler, only fetches periodically. It feels like a step in the right direction for managing resource strain across the internet. If only the LLM giants could do something similar.
A crawler that respects robots.txt is useless in practice since many sites only allow Googlebot and maaaybe Bing - by name.
And you think all this web AI crawlers will respect robots.txt. That era is gone.
The big USA ones do, and it would be madness for them to do otherwise.
But that's meaningless because 99% of AI crawlers are "bad bots" which ignore robots.txt and use domestic IPs to circumvent blocks.
That doesn't match my experience. For example, I recently had Meta scrape robots.txt disallowed paths. On some page they claimed they respect it but they don't. And yes, all the IPs they used to connect to me (they used a different /64 network for each connection) were owned by Meta, it was not someone pretending to be them.
Some other reports of this: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/1565
I ended up just fully closing connections with no response from these assholes on any URL.
How does Cloudflare manage to hit the HN front page almost daily? Don't get me wrong, they build cool stuff, but the frequency is wild.
Because it's their release week, so there's multiple new products every day. The overlap of people using HN and Cloudflare is pretty large, so not that surprising.
I suspect also to do with internal Slack etc. where employees vote on launch posts (a lot of them on HN since long). Not a scam or accusing anyone but this probably propels a lot.
Depending on what you do for work, you may be in that portal often (daily).
A related Q: why are their products so popular? I get why CDN/DDOS protection is but what about everything else? I have never ever found a use for stuff like Workers. (Sincerely asking, not dismissing them as useless)
I resisted using them for a long time but it is really so convenient
Running your stuff, even private stuff, through a tunnel is great so that you don't have to expose your VPS' IPv4.
Their free tier for stuff like Workers and D1 is quite generous.
Workers is compute-on-demand and particularly only pay what you use. Especially in the current days, something like Workers is infinitely appealing if you don't want to manage or pay for a dedicated server, assuming the service you want to run can be completely hosted (or a replacement vibe-coded) for the Service Workers API / deployed to CF's platform.
You also don't pay for actual data transfer, so the billing is overall simpler - AWS and GCP have similar per-request compute options, but every part of the platform has extra fees (like per-gb data transfer billing, sometimes you need a VPC to interconnect services, secrets being an extra charge, etc).
Workers have a nice and easy deployment model (when it's not broken) compared to AWS lambda, so I get why people are tempted. It's one simple file compared to 4 separate pieces of infra. But yes, please, use anything else that doesn't pay for the CloudFlare protection racket. For example there's https://bunny.net/edge-scripting/
The workers paid tier is $5/month and you can do a LOT with that. Once you drink the cloudflare kool-aid regarding workers they let you build very scalable apps while jumping through many fewer hoops than you would on AWS/GCP, at a fraction of the cost.
Workers is their version of Lambda
Pages is a very convenient way of deploying static websites/SPAs with a generous free tier. You just need to find the tiny links in their dashboard to avoid accidentally using workers instead (which is supposed to supersede it but is clearly worse for this usecase).
Workers gives me a free static site, just dropped the .html file there (or connect to git).
CDN, DDoS protection, excellent DNS hosting features, web monitoring, web analytics, advanced web and service filtering and blocking, zerotrust networking / vpn options, a solid API that works great with terraform, tons of other stuff.
Note - you should not be hosting purely static sites with Workers, if you can avoid it, give CF Pages is actually free and unlimited (assuming you don't use "Functions", which are just workers in disguise).
I am paying $0 for this worker for years now, no restrictions.
(Actually multiple, one for each domain)
https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-for-platforms/w...
I wonder if the three search engines get access to cloudflare protected sites without any captcha or bot interventions
Most likely not. Their Crawling service for example does not bypass the cloudflare protections either.
You are conflating a couple of different things here
There actually is such a thing as verified bots on Cloudflare that gets through most blocks (and these services are likely are part of that), but ultimately it just depends on how the website owner has things set up in Cloudflare
I hate to be rude but once again I am begging people to actually read the post. It is mentioned in the second paragraph that they are all verified bots.
Actually it doesn't say they are verified bots but it does say that they follow the verified bots standards. But yes I think we can assume they are verified bots which I already said in my comment so I'm not really sure what the purpose of your reply is?
> There actually is such a thing as verified bots on Cloudflare that gets through most blocks
Verified bot is just a label. What you do with that information is entirely up to you as the operator. It doesn't say anything anything about the service and doesn't provide any guarantees about the traffic.
No it's not just a label because it's a category that gets used in the firewall settings. A lot of sites allow only verified bots and block non-verified ones. So yes as I already mentioned website owners can of course block verified bots but it's much much less common than blocking non-verified ones because most site owners don't want to accidentally deindex their site from Google...
You get to decide per bot. Or per category: https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/concepts/bot/verified... You can make for that Google or all indexers are always allowed.
My number one question about search APIs is always if they allow you to store and resyndicate results you get from them.
If I'm running an agent system but I'm not allowed to store the responses - or provide a "share transcript" button - that's a pretty significant limitation.
The answer to that question is inevitably buried deep in the terms. Here's the relevant section I found for Ceramic, in their list of things you can't do:
> (n) collect, aggregate, store, or compile Output, including search results, relevance scores, or rankings, for the purpose of creating or contributing to any database, dataset, index, or corpus, whether or not such database, dataset, index, or corpus is used for a purpose that competes with Ceramic; (o) resell, syndicate, or otherwise make Output available to any third party on a standalone basis or as a separately accessible component of another product or service; provided that you may display Output to your authorized end users within your own application so long as such Output is integrated into your application's functionality, is incident to the end user’s real-time query, and is not independently accessible, extractable, or downloadable by end users or third parties; or (p) retain, cache, or store Output beyond what is reasonably necessary to display such Output to your authorized end users in the ordinary and real-time course of use, unless expressly permitted in an applicable Order Form.
https://www.ceramic.ai/terms-of-service
Am I alone in caring about this?
You are not alone, I agree that this is a frustrating limitation.
It’s a shit tier web scraping startup, just violate their terms, who cares.
This is the right way to think about it. If there's any fear of getting caught, just use a reputable VPN or one of the hundreds of residential proxy providers.
The whole point of this product from Cloudflare is to let LLMs "top up" their corpus of knowledge with up-to-the-minute search results after they have been trained on the contents of the entire Internet. The idea that courts would enforce intellectual property rights on little upstarts trying to make LLM wrappers without enforcing any TOS affecting the massive training scrapers is ridiculous. Probably true, but logically unjustifiable.
My general stance on things like this is to think about the intent -- why does the company have that in their TOS. Use that as a proxy for assessing the likelihood of the company enforcing the terms against you.
This is only valid up to the level of risk you can tolerate for them pulling the rug out from under you.
Which is why, as much as I love Cloudflare, I wouldn't route things like this through their billing. The risk that a company's entire infrastructure goes down, perhaps even by a fraud/risk flag by an incorrectly-configured AI (including, say, if the search API providers are back-sharing their own potentially-broken abuse flagging metadata with Cloudflare), is far too great.
It seemed like this part gives you the exception you wanted:
> provided that you may display Output to your authorized end users within your own application so long as such Output is integrated into your application's functionality, is incident to the end user’s real-time query ...
but it continues:
> ... and is not independently accessible, extractable, or downloadable by end users or third parties
How can you prevent end users from extracting it if its visible? Why even have the exception if you just throw it out with an impossible to meet restriction like this?
Not to mention: "retain, cache, or store Output beyond what is reasonably necessary to display such Output to your authorized end users in the ordinary and real-time course of use" which would seem to preclude storing it in a long lived session.
The phrase "reasonably necessary" is infuriatingly vague.
So they crawled the web, stole the information to populate their own database and then pretend it was "illegal" for others to steal it back?
The weird attitude in the Internet Tech company scene is akin to Gold Rush scenarios.
Who are the native people?
The data is the moat, the compute is a cost center.
“You're looking at 'em...”
- Tony Soprano
Don't think it's unreasonable. They crawled it and made it available in an easy to digest form. You can't take their copy and start distributing it infinitely while paying them for one-time read. Write your crawler, and crawl the web on your own if you want... and give it away!
You glaze over the fact, they stole the data to begin with and never recuperate their sources. That's not "reasonable".
They don't make it available "easily" either, they place all kinds of hurdles on it, including you having to pay for stolen goods.
You then go on, equating wildly different situations: on one hand, a multi-billion dollar company, easily able to set up such a scheme. On the other (me representing) the public, regularly anything but destitute.
So no, you're the unreasonable one here. So are they.
Search engines that obey robots.txt are stealing?
If someone does not want on a search engine index and they say not to index, and then get indexed anyhow is stealing.
But a “please read my content and make available to your users” then claim doing so is stealing seems a bit out there.
What am I missing?
There is a difference between "read my content and make it available to your users" and "make money by reading my content and making it available to your users". Terms of use like this are trying to say "we are the only ones who get to make money from this", and therein lies the problem.
> So they crawled the web, stole the information to populate their own database and then pretend it was "illegal" for others to steal it back?
These days, this seems to be "modus operandi". The bet is who can get closer to the administration to suddenly enforce the un-enforce-able. For your own safety. You wouldn't steal a car now, would you?
To acquiesce to manufactured "social truths", to resign complacently to them being "modus operandi" means to place yourself outside of the society you live in.
You make yourself subject to a social reality you presume outside of your control. But you enabled them, if by nothing else, by your silent acceptance.
Moral and ethical judgements cannot be left to the very same people they are supposed to restrain in the first place.
Who knew the fix all along was just scolding people for being the wrong kind of frustrated
heavy metal guitar chords commence
You engage in ridiculing your own demise. Why so sure you'll enjoy it?
Why not use those providers directly? Does Cloudflare need to be in the middle of everything?
It would be difficult for them to provide intelligence to the US without being in the middle of everything.
[flagged]
National security, bro.
How else you are going to make them give you search second party API's, they just bridge it for you reliably
I've been using the web search in OpenRouter, which is similar in that it's a wrapper around other search engine providers. It's really convenient to be able to experiment with new models and new search engines without having to go through corporate hoops to subscribe to a new service.
You tell us, you're the president of bonsai.io.
Why would I use bonsai? Why not use ElasticSearch directly?
I think Cloudflare is (for companies already using it) approaching the status of trusted main cloud supplier (which usually would be AWS, GCP, Azure) via which the majority of cloud costs are billed (so you don't have to go through a fresh procurement process).
Replace trusted with convenient. They're glowing pretty hard giving out all that stuff very cheap in exchange for being the middle man on everything. Not that I mind for my trivial use case.
I think their strategy is: "AI coding means we can build everything. Our infrastructure approach is incredibly quick to build upon, so why not build it all ourselves and then anyone with half a brain will move their stuff to Cloudflare and leave AWS in the dust."
This practice of having the one provider should be eliminated. Companies self-inflict lock-in to large platform providers, prevent their own teams from using better technology options and stifle innovation. It's crazy that even with a pile of SOC/ISO/PCI/HIPAA/NIS certificates, procurement is still a months-long process, it should be much easier to do business.
It doesn't help that a lot of companies want to sniff out how much cash the customer has before even showing any terms and pricing.
I don't know what you mean by "trusted", but how many times do folks have to go through the same loop?
- Company has great initial product
- Company gets popular
- Shareholders demand infinite growth
- Company becomes rent-seeker
- GOTO 10
CloudFlare is FedRAMP high. This is a pretty big deal for a lot of a certain type of system owners.
> I don't know what you mean by "trusted",
It means "hi spending approver, I'm going to add $100 to our CF account" instead of "hi accounting+management+security, please initiate the process of evaluating new third party vendor Foo for use in my project, I hope we can get it approved and integrated into SSO sometime next month".
There is nothing wrong with “inserting yourself in the middle of everybody’s business”. That is how you reduce friction between parties and make optimizations that are only possible by being able to manage both sides of the connection. It’s also a really good way to make money.
Well... there's "nothing wrong" with being a car dealership either. "Wrong" is a funny way to look at it.
Cloudflare are setting themselves up as the arbiter who will decide which requests are a) human, b) authorized AI bots, c) illicit/banned bots.
Given the number of people on HN who report massive problems from scrapers and other bots, it sounds like if Cloudflare doesn't do this, someone else will need to. I might have thought bandwidth was cheap enough now for it not to matter, but I guess the bots are costing some sites a lot of money.
Cloudflare seems to be very excited to eventually get a 30% cut on pay-to-crawl.
As for the bots, I thought the same thing, but it is indeed a huge problem. They've brought my websites down pretty frequently recently. I tried Cloudflare but visitors complained, and I think you can't win against the bots anyway, so I've resorted to performance improvements and serving every request.
It isn't bandwidth that causes problems. It is the various types of load that they can add to your servers. Which is why no centralized vendor can decide the proper caching or what bots should be blocked, allowed, rate limited, etc. Those things do not have standard answers - it depends on what your apps do, your audience, their usage patterns, and sometimes the regulatory environment in which you run.
Cloudflare doesn't block bots. It's trivial to use residential proxies and your very obvious bot will only get blocked maybe 5% of the time when using rotating IPs.
They give you the tools. Your options are:
- let more traffic in, eat the compute cost
- block larger cohorts of traffic, affect many real users
- babysit the rules to get them just right, lose time doing that
In my experience the residential proxies exist but are not that common and many aren't trying as hard as they could. It's really a war of which side wants to spend more attention on the problem.
The last sentence is certainly true. Lazy bots you can block yourself and don't really need CF to help with.
Ease of integration and billing. Failover. Higher trust.
Curious what other people’s experience is with cloudflare billing. When you go through an AE, everything seems made up anyways.
To add to this, some organizations just prefer using one provider for their cloud service. So if they build on Azure/Google Cloud/AWS, then everything needs to be on there. Cloudflare probably wants to offer the same here, where everything can be built on Cloudflare.
Not sure where the trust claim lands, but the first two are now exceedingly trivial with code agents. A little more work perhaps, but not hard at all. I’ve done this myself (not with those providers) with several search platforms.
> A little more work perhaps, but not hard at all
Extremely hard to verify it's been done properly across a large organization.
CloudFlare AI Gateway was quite convenient for me - I wanted to give my zeroclaw instance a limited budget to services like Image generation/Replicate/Fal.ai, which would mean for each service I'd have to run my own proxy that stores the keys and cuts off the real calls if we go over the limits. Easy to do but still extra thing to build and maintain.
Instead I put my API keys to cloudflare, set limits, and gave the agent the CloudFlare token, and in minutes it could contact tens of services.
edit: not to mention instead of loading balance to each service I could just keep balance on cloudflare that covers them all
Why would anyone trust Cloudflare?
Same way people trust Microsoft: "We already use them, and using them for this additional service exposes no data they wouldn't already have access to from all the other services we buy from them"
I trust Cloudflare more than I trust some other players in the arena. They have a decent track record of being neutral infrastructure provider. They seem technically strong, deploying Rust widely and caring about performance in a way that most firms do not. They're likely covertly funded by intelligence services so they don't have economic incentives to enshitify their offerings or deliberately screw me over.
Put it this way: I'd rather Cloudflare owns the Internet than Google, Meta, Amazon or Alibaba.
> or deliberately screw me over.
Cloudflare is however known to deliberately screw over some of their clients.
> I'd rather Cloudflare owns the Internet
I'd rather no one does, certainly not a firm that feeds into the NSA.
>I'd rather no one does, certainly not a firm that feeds into the NSA.
The government always wins this given enough time.
Citation? The only case I'm aware of is when they removed DDoS protection for the Daily Stormer[0], and tbqh that made me feel more positively toward them. Yes, it was an impulsive, emotionally-motivated choice but that was relatable to me.
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
>impulsive, emotionally-motivated
Yes that's precisely how I want infrastructure to operate.
It wasn't an impulsive decision. They kept the Daily Stormer's account active up until Andrew Anglin said CF kept offering him their services because they quietly agreed with him.
> Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
> Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
Yes, you are quoting from the exact same blog I linked, but you're wrong. It was an impulsive decision[0]
Per Matthew Prince:
"This was my decision. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I’d had enough.
Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company."
This is one of the best, most honest things I've seen a tech CEO write. Contrast this with Zuckerberg's mealy-mouthed weaseling about "policies"[1]. I wish more tech overlords had the honesty to say, "No, we are not a court. We are booting you because we don't like you."
[0] https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to...
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/read-mark-zuckerbergs-full-statemen...
Cloudflare is known to extort customers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44150898 (2025)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40481808 (2024)
https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-web...
Reddit comments report more such incidents, with Cloudflare demanding an upgrade to Enterprise. This has also come up for other sites, such as gambling sites.
Also, Cloudflare implicitly screws over everyone by leaking data to the NSA.
> Also, Cloudflare implicitly screws over everyone by leaking data to the NSA
I have always operated under the assumption that every cloud provider and telco does this, so this claim has always seemed very silly to me.
Huh. When you don't use a man-in-the-middle service, you don't have this problem. When you host on a cloud vendor, you don't have this problem because you control the HTTPS certificate and don't leak it to the MITM. The assumption as such seems silly to me.
Your DNS lookups and IPs in use provide a lot of info. It's not always the data inside an encryption layer that is the most important.
That said, these are US companies subject to FISA court orders and NSLs or National Security Letters. If they want your data, they can just pull it from memory in real time or pull it directly from the hypervisor and dump it wherever they're instructed to. Any idea that your data is protected because you're not even using a provider WAF or doing TLS termination for load balancing is a fantasy.
> Your DNS lookups
I control which DNS server I use. It is not relevant to the matter at hand.
> If they want your data, they can just pull it from memory in real time or pull it directly from the hypervisor and dump it wherever they're instructed to.
You're confusing bulk data collection with highly selective court-ordered data collection. The two are not alike. Attempting to equate them is a dumb attempt at deception on your part. There is no obligation for a firm to share bulk web data with the NSA.