Cloudflare turned a bold idea into a market-defining move – earning 2,000+ backlinks, lifting branded searches, and shaping AI visibility.
We’ve reached an inflection point in how people find and trust information.
AI-powered search, instant answers, and LLM assistants are reshaping discovery at a pace that forces companies to rethink long-standing business models.
Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl initiative provides a timely case study of how a tech brand can respond to this shift – using product strategy to compete for traffic and shape the very terms of the market conversation.
This mini-study examines how Cloudflare positioned itself ahead of the curve, balancing a disruptive product launch with a purpose-driven narrative.
From an SEO-led PR perspective, the analysis focuses on one central choice: instead of chasing existing queries, Cloudflare created its own.
That approach generated results far beyond visibility, influencing press coverage, investor sentiment, and branded search demand.
Note: This analysis does not evaluate the potential impact of Pay Per Crawl on Cloudflare’s clients’ traffic or AI visibility. It focuses solely on the campaign’s effect on Cloudflare’s brand equity up to July 18.
The facts
To get familiar with the context, in case you missed what Cloudflare announced during the last few months, please read the following key milestones, sorted by date:
* Sept. 23, 2024: Cloudflare announces a public preview of AI Audit – this is the first time the company says it will let publishers “set a fair price for crawls.”
* Sept. 23, 2024: Formal announcement reinforcing the monetization angle and opening the wait-list.
* Sept. 23, 2024: Technical release note for the AI Audit launch.
* Dec. 10, 2024: Robotcop update – adds robots.txt enforcement to AI Audit, tightening control ahead of pricing.
* July 1, 2025: Pay Per Crawl official private-beta launch – explains 402 flow, pricing headers, and Cloudflare as Merchant of Record.
* July 1, 2025: Cloudflare releases the “Content Independence Day” positioning piece: default flips to block unless paid.
* July 1, 2025: Detailed how-to and header spec (crawler-max-price, crawler-exact-price, etc.).
* July 1, 2025: Release note for the Pay Per Crawl feature switch-on.
* July 1, 2025: Cloudflare claims to be the first infra provider to “block AI crawlers without payment.”
I’ve put together a table showing Cloudflare’s stock prices alongside its quarterly earnings and key product updates to help uncover any correlations:
Dig deeper: Why PR is becoming more essential for AI search visibility
The impact
To quantify the campaign’s impact to date, the analysis focuses on four key findings across a spectrum of performance indicators:
* Digital PR effectiveness.
* Financial market reaction (stock price).
* Audience interest (branded search volume).
* Digital positioning (search and AI visibility).
Key finding 1: 1,300+ press articles, 2,177 new backlinks, and 897 referring domains
Between September 2024 and July 18, 2025, Cloudflare earned an estimated ~1,380 press mentions, based on a conservative 65% coverage ratio.
These mentions appeared across top-tier outlets, including:
* The New York Times.
* BBC.
* TechCrunch.
* Business Insider.
Coverage also extended to:
* Leading .edu domains.
* Premier SEO/PPC publications such as Search Engine Land.
* Community-driven platforms like Reddit and Hacker News.
Over the same period, Ahrefs data confirms 2,177 new backlinks from 897 unique referring domains, 84% of which are standard, underscoring the campaign’s authority and link equity.
Basis for the 65% coverage estimate
Campaigns that secure 897 linking domains typically drive an additional 0.5 unlinked brand mentions per referring domain – meaning around 450 unlinked mentions in this case – bringing Cloudflare’s total media footprint to approximately 1,830 touchpoints.
This represents a massive win for both brand visibility and SEO authority.
While the exact number of press articles may differ, this study uses a conservative 65% coverage estimate.
Backlinks and referring domains per URL
The table below shows the total backlinks and referring domains Cloudflare had earned per URL as of July 18, 2025, to assess the effectiveness of each content asset in driving link acquisition.
What’s especially interesting is how different asset types drove referring domains acquisition:
Beyond backlinks and referring domains, earned press also drives social shares and referral traffic.
The SharedCount Bulk tool was used to get the full picture for Cloudflare.
While it only tracks Facebook and Pinterest, the data still provides valuable insight into which content types resonated most with readers, further expanding Cloudflare’s footprint across the web.
(Note: Tools such as BuzzSumo can capture shares across additional networks. This broader scope falls outside the limits of this mini-study.)
Table with the Total Pinterest and Facebook Share Counts of Cloudflare’s initiative:
Key takeaways
* Blog posts drove the lion’s share of backlinks
* Blog posts were the clear winners for social engagement as well
* Press releases act as strategic amplifiers, not direct links or share magnets
* Timing and distribution matter as much as messaging
* Technical assets lag behind – opportunity for repackaging
Key finding 2: The company’s stock rallied from $85.61 (September 2024) to $197.35 (July 2025) – a 131 % increase
Another compelling dimension of Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl campaign was its contribution to this share-price surge.
This section examines how a brand’s marketing and digital PR initiatives can drive tangible financial impact, reflected in stock gains, even before a product’s official launch.
While this study does not claim stock-market expertise, LLM-assisted research into major financial institutions and analyst commentary helps explain the rally.
Analysts attributed the growth primarily to three factors:
* The stock’s rally was driven by a strategic transformation from a content delivery network (CDN) into a comprehensive “connectivity cloud” platform.
* The market recognized Cloudflare as a foundational part of both the enterprise IT stack and the growing AI economy.
* This narrative was supported by consistent quarterly earnings beats and the visionary launch of the AI Crawler Payments system. You can access the full AI report here.
Key takeaways
* Narrative shaped perceived value before launch
* Wait-list and media pickup validated market interest
* SEO and social metrics served as early ‘revenue’ proxies
* Private-beta launch drove a sharp one-day spike
Dig deeper: In GEO, brand mentions do what links alone can’t
Key finding 3: Cloudflare’s branded searches rose by +18.7% in 2025 YoY
This section tracks Cloudflare’s branded search volume from September 2024 through mid-2025 – and placed those figures in the context of the broader upward trend since 2022.
Branded queries hit an all-time high in June 2025 at 5,235,660 searches, up from 3,447,820 in June 2024.
The average search volume in Q1-Q2 2025 was 18.7% higher than the same period in 2024.
This analysis helps illustrate how heightened brand visibility – fueled by the Pay Per Crawl campaign and related PR efforts – correlates with growing market interest over time.
Dimensions and KPIs excluded from this analysis:
* Business impact data: We don’t have access to precise adoption or revenue figures, so we’ll need to wait for Cloudflare’s Q3 2025 financial report before drawing any firm conclusions.
* Traffic estimates: Traffic-estimator data (e.g., Semrush, Ahrefs, Similarweb) was excluded, as these tools often diverge from actual analytics. This ensures the integrity of the study.
Key takeaways
Key finding 4: Search engines and LLMs already favor Cloudflare on core campaign terms
This part briefly examines Cloudflare’s organic and AI visibility for its signature terms.
Rather than targeting an established, high-volume segment, Cloudflare coined proprietary queries – “robotcop” and “Content Independence Day” – and consistently reinforced them across all assets.
As the screenshots below show, the brand now holds the top spot in Google U.S. for “pay per crawl” and even appears in AI overview snippets and ChatGPT responses.
This signals that both search engines and LLMs treat Cloudflare as the definitive authority on these terms.
Notably, Cloudflare achieved this without any prior market validation, favoring a branding-focused approach over a purely data-driven strategy.
Note: This study does not include an in-depth SEO analysis of each individual asset in this section. It focuses on how Cloudflare’s unconventional approach challenges traditional data-driven SEO strategies. A deeper asset-level review would surely reveal additional insights, lessons, and/or potential missteps.
The monthly search volumes for the terms Cloudflare introduced during its campaign were near zero, according to Google Keyword Planner or Semrush:
Yet Cloudflare’s pages now rank in Position 1 in Google U.S. for “Content Independence Day” and “pay per crawl” (as confirmed by Semrush) and even appear in AI Overviews.
ChatGPT likewise cites the company’s initiative when explaining the concept, underscoring the campaign’s early impact across both traditional and AI-driven discovery channels.
Key takeaways
* Strategic term coinage bridged branding and search
* Coordinated roll-out amplified cross-channel impact
* Emerging-market positioning cemented thought leadership
Shaping digital PR: Lessons from Cloudflare
Purpose-driven marketing never stops delivering
By anchoring Pay Per Crawl in a clear purpose – fair pricing for AI crawlers – Cloudflare showed that campaigns rooted in genuine brand values resonate more deeply than purely tactical SEO plays.
This purpose-driven approach sustained visibility across any channel, building trust and momentum even before any revenue was generated.
Drawing on Simon Sinek’s concept “Start With Why”, Cloudflare’s “Content Independence Day” exemplified leading with purpose rather than product features.
It articulated why the initiative mattered (protecting publisher rights) before detailing how it worked.
This differentiated the campaign and cemented the brand’s authority in both search results and AI-driven responses.
Do not hesitate to develop and seed new branded search terms to capture exclusive search real estate
Cloudflare dared to introduce new branded search terms for this initiative.
This reinforces what Rand Fiskin and Tim Soulo highlighted a few months ago.
In an AI-dominated world, marketers must stop chasing generic, high-volume queries and instead coin proprietary, low-volume terms that embody their unique story.
By doing so, you create demand around your brand’s narrative rather than simply serving existing search intent.
The shift from traditional digital-PR SEO to SEO-led PR is no longer optional
Classic digital-PR SEO centered on brands broadcasting their own news.
In the generative AI era, however, PR must run in two directions. Initiatives should:
* Be triggered by real-time search and market intelligence.
* Amplify the brand’s visibility across search engines and AI surfaces.
Rather than simply issuing press releases, modern teams:
* Track trending queries.
* Respond with data-rich reports and surveys.
* Insert timely insight into live conversations.
They replace the one-way, brand-centric model with a dynamic, insight-driven dialogue.
At my agency, we call this approach “SEO PR.”
By grounding every outreach wave (pre-launch, launch, and post-launch) in up-to-the-minute keyword, market, and trend data, brands can maximize their footprint across both search engines and language models.
Traditional PR fundamentals – strong relationships, compelling storytelling, and newsworthy angles – remain essential.
They now work hand-in-hand with this data-driven framework to deliver maximum impact.
Run multiple digital PR waves (pre-launch, launch, post-launch)
Staggered outreach unlocks repeated chances for:
* Earned press.
* Brand mentions.
* Backlinks.
These are critical assets for visibility in today’s LLM-driven landscape.
More PR waves equal more visibility.
Dig deeper: 7 ways to grow brand mentions, a key metric for AI Overviews visibility
Embedding clear ‘read more’ CTAs in press releases is vital
Including prominent calls-to-action in the release directing readers to the blog post boosted click-throughs.
Journalists appreciate a ready link to deeper details, and readers gain greater value.
Measure well beyond backlinks, rankings, or traffic alone
Success isn’t just the volume of links on the release itself, but also the downstream pickup.
Track referral traffic, social shares, and subsequent mentions of the blog post to capture the full impact of your PR distribution.
Last but not least, remember to optimize every asset of yours
Cloudflare:
* Tightened internal linking and on-page SEO to channel the authority earned during the campaign.
* Likely applied the same discipline to partner and press-hosted content.
This ensures the brand captures maximum visibility across search engines and AI surfaces.
Do not skip doing the same for your own campaigns.
Turn Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl campaign into an SEO PR playbook for the AI era
Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl campaign is a masterclass in forward-thinking digital PR.
It shows how brands can lead emerging markets by creating new narratives instead of chasing established search arenas.
The campaign highlights the impact of combining purpose-driven storytelling with data-informed, multi-wave PR to build lasting authority across both traditional and AI-powered ecosystems.
For marketers in the AI era, Cloudflare’s approach is a clear call to:
* Innovate boldly.
* Coin proprietary search terms.
* Run insight-driven outreach that drives visibility while shaping the future of brand equity and leadership.
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