Could Cloudflare’s “pay per crawl” save news from AI? Even if you don’t work in the news business, you’ve probably heard the worries of journalists and digital creators everywhere that AI is slurping up all our hard work and giving us nothing in return — not money or even clicks that lead to money — as we see Google Search traffic fall off a cliff amid the rise of AI overviews. Yes, some companies paid to use material to train their AI, but many other models have been trained on pirated content. Well, possibly good news! An unlikely company, Cloudflare, is stepping in with a novel solution to this problem: “pay per crawl.” Basically, Cloudflare is the content delivery wizard behind the internet curtain that ensures its customers’ websites, images, and videos are accessible quickly around the world. That gives Cloudflare the unique ability to control who gets to see the content that it’s distributing. While individual website owners can try to block AI bots from scraping their sites, Cloudflare can do it for billions of web pages at a time across 125 countries. The company says it serves about 20% of the web. https://techcrunch.com/20..