Take a before-picture of your client sites
On 15 September Cloudflare changes a default. Most likely it will not affect your clients — but after the date there is no way to find out either way. Crawler access is not recorded anywhere, and a before-picture cannot be taken retrospectively.
Up to 25 sites. No card. About ten minutes. On 16 September you get one page showing what changed and what did not.
First, the part everyone is getting wrong
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| When | 15 September 2026 |
| Who is affected | New Cloudflare customers, new sites added by existing customers, and all existing free-tier customers |
| Which pages | Only pages that display ads |
| Which crawlers | Training and Agent categories. Search crawlers are not affected |
| Can you override it | Yes. Security → Bots. About twenty minutes |
So why do anything before the 15th?
Because “probably fine” is not an answer you can give a client.
Crawler access leaves no trace in analytics. There is no log. And robots.txt only tells you what is declared, not what your CDN or your host's firewall actually does to a request. So on 16 September, when somebody asks whether anything changed for their site, the honest answer available to almost everybody is going to be a shrug.
That is fixable, but only in one direction. The measurement has to happen first.
What you get
Before the 15th
All 19 named AI crawlers tested against every site you add, plus robots.txt, JavaScript rendering and llms.txt. Stored with a timestamp.
On the 15th
Everything is re-checked on the day itself and again the morning after, so a change lands inside the window rather than up to six hours later.
On the 16th
One page per account: every site, before and after, with the ones that moved at the top. Yours to forward, whatever it says.
What this costs, and what happens after
Nothing, and no card. The free plan normally watches one site; until 15 September it takes 25 so you can put a whole portfolio in.
On 19 September it goes back to one site. Nothing auto-charges and nothing gets deleted — the sites you added keep being checked and the history stays on your account. What changes is that adding the next one is refused. If you want to keep watching all of them the plans are $19 for five sites and $49 for twenty-five. If you do not, the report is still yours.
Do I have to verify 25 domains?
No. Sites added for a baseline are checked from the outside, exactly the way an AI crawler would visit — the same request anyone can already run on the free checker without an account. Nothing to install, no DNS record, no file upload.
Verification is only needed for the things that reach into a site or speak for it, and those stay where they are:
- Unverified — checks, full history, and the 16 September report.
- Verified — all of that, plus alert emails, verified-visit tracking, and client-ready reports.
It is one DNS record, file or meta tag per domain, it takes a minute, and you can do it later for the sites where you want the alerts.
One page, on Wednesday the 16th
Whatever it says.
No account is needed to run a single check. The free plan is what keeps checking, and until the 15th it holds a whole portfolio.