Cloudflare, Inc. and GoDaddy have formed a partnership to help give website owners and AI developers transparency and control over how their content is used by AI, while also supporting standards to better identify AI agents. Together, the companies aim to help bring identity, trust, and access to the agentic open web.
The internet is shifting from being built just for people to now supporting AI agents too. Without clear standards, this could lead to more unmanageable and potentially harmful bot traffic. Cloudflare and Go Daddy have identified that website owners need better tools to identify, control, and trust AI activity.
GoDaddy will now integrate Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control into its website hosting platform, helping website owners gain visibility and control over how automated AI-powered crawlers access their website content, all whilst helping keep their site protected.
Identity and Transparency for AI Agents
Beyond just controlling crawls to a site, the industry needs standardised ways to verify who operates an agent and what an agent is allowed to do. However, enforcing consistent identification methods for bots and agents that want to interact with web applications in a safe manner is a more nuanced problem.
ANS is a global open standard introduced by GoDaddy that is designed to support consistent naming, verification, and discovery for AI agents across systems, using proven open standards, domain name system (DNS), and public key infrastructure (PKI). ANS enables website owners to distinguish legitimate AI agents from unidentified AI agents, including malicious impersonators, on the open web.
Cloudflare is committed to a transparent agentic web and supports ANS and the development of a broad range of verifiable agent identity standards. In 2025, Cloudflare also introduced Web Bot Auth as a new method of using cryptography to verify bot and agent traffic, as well as a Signature Agent Card to help agent developers transparently share their agent’s identity and purpose. With an open ecosystem of standards and methods for identifying agents, the agentic web can evolve with transparency built in by default.
Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer at Cloudflare, explains:
“The Internet is evolving into a high-velocity, AI-driven ecosystem, and that requires a new kind of transparent infrastructure. 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.”
The Cloudflare and GoDaddy partnership aim to provide the technical architecture to move into the agentic web era and help to:
- Enforce a permission-based model for the agentic web: GoDaddy is integrating Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control directly into its hosting experience. This allows any website owner to set their own terms, such as choosing to allow, block, or signal that payment is required, thus protecting the value of their content.
- Build trust and transparency into AI-native commerce: By supporting ANS and Web Bot Auth, the partnership will provide the verifiable identity layer needed for a functional digital marketplace. This ensures that when an agent makes a request, whether for a data query or an autonomous purchase, its identity is cryptographically signed, creating the trust necessary for a sustainable value exchange.
- Secure a fair value exchange in the Answer Engine era: By combining granular audit logs with transparent agent identity, GoDaddy and Cloudflare will enable an ecosystem where human-generated content remains the lifeblood of the web but is protected and compensated in an AI-first world.
GoDaddy Chief Strategy Officer, Jared Sine, comments:
“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. We move at the speed of the Internet, and we’re working with the broader industry to ensure the agentic open web does too.”
