The Closing Web in 2026: How AI Crawler Blocking and Pay-Per-Crawl Changed Web Scraping
Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default and charges them at a 402 Pay-Per-Crawl paywall, 2.5M+ sites disallow AI training, and the courts are redrawing the lines. A researched map of the 2026 data wars โ and why real residential/mobile IPs are how legitimate public-data collection survives.
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