March 20, 2026  |  SIGN UP

Jim Cooper
DIGIDAY, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Speed to scale seems to be the order of the day as the whole media and marketing world rushes (stumbles) to stay ahead of AI developments, confusions and threats.

That, as we reported this week, even applies to Cloudflare, the guardian of publishers, which is festooned with tools that block illicit and unwelcome content scraping. The company released a crawl API (its crawl endpoint within Cloudflare’s browser rendering API) that can scrape an entire website with one request.

The move alarmed publishers, who feared Cloudflare was becoming the very thing it pledged to guard against: a scraper sitting between publishers and AI. Back to the point about speed, Cloudflare admitted the crawl API was a rush job and that they were quickly addressing and fixing the features that initially rang the publisher trust bell. Maybe pump the brakes.

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AI REVENUE GENERATION

Cloudflare’s compliant crawler highlights tension – and opportunity – in the emerging AI content market

Cloudflare is pushing to create a market for licensed AI content, offering a compliant crawler aimed at giving publishers more control and reducing inefficient site crawls — even as some question the irony of the company that once blocked scrapers now building one itself.

MEMBER EXCLUSIVE

Future of Marketing Briefing: Agency operating systems face a differentiation problem

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PARTNER INSIGHTS FROM VIAFOURA

How participation takes publishers from rented audiences to engaged communities

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NAVIGATING ECONOMIC INSTABILITY

Macy’s, Inc. is looking to leverage AI ahead of a cautious outlook for 2026

The company will continue its plans to close 65 Macy’s nameplate stores, as part of a previously announced 150 store closures, and will look to artificial intelligence to improve operations throughout the fleet.

A MESSAGE FROM VIASAT ADS

Why marketers can’t count out the value of the in-flight audience

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See how it works

THE CREATOR ECONOMY

Brands turn niche news creators into a new earned media engine

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GENERATIVE AI

Shopify says purchases are coming ‘inside ChatGPT’ through agentic storefronts as OpenAI retreats on Instant Checkout

Shopify told merchants their products will soon be discoverable and purchasable inside ChatGPT through its new “agentic storefronts” feature as OpenAI shifts how checkout works inside the chatbot.

PARTNER INSIGHTS FROM THE WEATHER COMPANY

Video: How weather universally drives consumer behavior

Weather impacts what people try, buy and how they feel. This powers targeting to predict the moments when weather shifts a consumer’s mindset toward purchase, driving sales and long-term growth. Learn more in this video.