Cloudflare, a provider of connectivity cloud services, and GoDaddy , a firm dedicated to fostering digital entrepreneurship, have made a joint statement announcing an important strategic alliance that will fundamentally transform the “agentic web” infrastructure. The partnership seeks to utilize AI governance tools and promote the adoption of new standards of openness in order to enable website owners and AI developers greater visibility and control.
The Shift Toward an Agent-First Internet
The classic web, designed mainly for people accessing web pages, is developing into a new-age system where artificial intelligence operates as independent entities for users. The lack of standards here could result in small companies and content providers being swamped by untraceable bots or harmful bots.
To address this issue, Cloudflare and GoDaddy are launching a new technology model centered around identity and permissions.
Granting Visibility and Power to Content Creators
One of the key aspects of this alliance includes immediate adoption of AI Crawl Control technology by Cloudflare in the global hosting network of GoDaddy. It enables millions of innovators and creators to control the interaction of AI crawlers with their digital assets.
This joint venture operates under three fundamental pillars of the future web:
- Permission-based Access: Users will be able to control access for crawlers, allowing them to either accept, reject, or inform that payment is due for scraping their website content.
- Cryptographic “Identity”: The companies plan to support both ANS (Agent Name Service) and Web Bot Auth, which means that any request to extract information from websites made by bots will have a verified identity.
- Economic Viability: With the rise of “Answer Engines” replacing the classic search and click paradigm, it offers hope to preserve the economic sustainability of human content through audit logging and identity.
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Leadership Perspectives
“The Internet is evolving into a high-velocity, AI-driven ecosystem, and that requires a new kind of transparent infrastructure,” said Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudflare. “By putting tools like AI Crawl Control and open standards into the hands of website owners, we are providing essential underpinnings for a new Internet business model. We want to ensure that every creator has the tools to verify who is interacting with their site, while giving legitimate AI agents a secure, transparent way to participate in a thriving open web.”
“By working with Cloudflare on AI Crawl Control and championing the Agent Name Service, an open standard giving every agent a verifiable identity built on DNS, we are providing our customers the transparency they need to thrive in an AI-first world,” said GoDaddy Chief Strategy Officer, Jared Sine. “We move at the speed of the Internet, and we’re working with the broader industry to ensure the agentic open web does too.”
Setting the Standard for AI Commerce
In addition to efficient traffic handling, this partnership tackles the “nuanced challenge” of native AI commerce. Thanks to the help of ANS, a globally open protocol created by GoDaddy, it becomes possible to discover and authenticate the agents using DNS and PKI. This creates a functioning virtual market through which independent transactions and data requests are possible within a trusted framework.
As the world of the agentic internet grows, both companies are dedicated to creating an open and transparent environment where creators and innovators can continue building on top of the internet.
