Content Signals Policy

Which signals are there?

There are three signals, each set to yes or no:

• search covers building a search index and providing search results, for example returning links and short excerpts.
• ai-input covers inputting content into AI models, for example retrieval augmented generation, grounding or real-time use for generative AI search answers.
• ai-train covers training or fine-tuning AI models.

A missing signal means no preference is stated.

How binding are they?

Cloudflare says the signals express preferences and are not technical countermeasures against scraping, and that some companies might ignore them. It recommends combining them with WAF rules and bot management for stronger enforcement. Whether specific search or AI companies evaluate the signals is not documented in the sources read.

For sites using Cloudflare’s managed robots.txt, the blog post gives the defaults as search=yes, ai-train=no, while Cloudflare’s docs list the default line as search=yes, ai-train=no, use=reference.

Example

User-Agent: *
Content-Signal: search=yes, ai-train=no
Allow: /

The site allows classic search and declines training. It states nothing about ai-input.

Last updated: October 7, 2026