Cloudflare and OpenAI say their pilot helped ChatGPT's search find hundreds of millions of new web pages

Cloudflare and OpenAI shared early results from a research pilot launched in July 2026. Using a cohort of about 1% of Cloudflare's network, signals about pages helped OpenAI's search crawler discover and index hundreds of millions of new pages for ChatGPT Search. Cloudflare says the signals also filter out addresses that do not exist or that redirect to a home page, flag single harmful pages such as a planted fake login form, and tell crawlers when a page has changed. It says the research uses metadata about the web, not page content for model training.

• If your website runs through Cloudflare, open AI Crawl Control in your dashboard and see which AI crawlers visit. Decide which you want to allow, because Cloudflare says a signal about a page does not grant permission to access it.
• Check that old or mistyped addresses on your site return a proper not-found page instead of redirecting to the home page. Cloudflare lists that pattern as something the pilot filters out.

Source: Cloudflare Blog. This is our short summary of their reporting. The paragraphs marked "Our read" and the things to do are SeedFoundry's opinion. The summary is drafted with AI tools. Image: Cloudflare Blog, from its own announcement. How we source and credit