The news that moves growth.

Cloudflare Will Write Your Robots.txt, And It Has A Point

Bot Preference Sync sets AI crawler policy per category, not per crawler. Allow GPTBot and block Bytespider, and no setting describes what you do.

The State Of Search In An AI World: What Marketing Leaders Need To Know Now

Is a traffic decline actually hurting your business? Our State of Search 2027 shows how to tell and where to invest next.

Google’s AI Payment Pilot Vs. Cloudflare & Microsoft Models

Google, Cloudflare, and Microsoft are testing different models for paying publishers when AI systems access or use their content.

Google Responds To Cross-Domain Canonical De-Indexing Report

Google's John Mueller explains how publishers can catch site problems before they become an indexing crisis.

More People Expect AI To Cut Jobs Than Add Them, Pew Finds

Pew's 37-country survey finds more people expect AI to reduce jobs than add them, a view more common in high-income countries than middle-income ones.

Google Updates Mediapartners-Google Crawler Guidance: Less About AdSense

Google expanded their Mediapartners-Google guidance to make it about more than just AdSense.

I Made My Website Charge AI Agents A Penny Per Page, Then I Watched Claude Pay It

GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and Googlebot won't pay your price yet. Charge now and you lose citations. Here's what to decide before the dashboard toggle arrives.

Social & Advertising

Walmart adds marketplace data, deeper AI features to Scintilla insights platform

This story was first published by Digiday sibling Modern Retail . Walmart’s first-party data platform for merchants and suppliers, Scintilla, is getting a big upgrade…

How women athletes are betting on the creator playbook

In 2026, being a pro athlete increasingly means being a full-time creator too. For women athletes in particular, content isn’t a side hustle; it’s become a crucial part…

Axios preps new Axios Direct feeds for AI models, agents as revenue tops 2026 goal

Axios reached its revenue goal for 2026. Now the news publisher is building a new revenue stream to keep up the pace in 2027 and beyond. This month Axios will take to…

Who wins and loses from the remedies to Google’s ad tech monopoly

It’s been 17 months of speculation over who wins and loses from the attempt to fix Google’s monopoly over online advertising. The remedies are finally here so here’s…

Future of Marketing Briefing: Creators are learning to pitch AEO, not just audiences

For better or worse, creators could soon sound like AEO consultants. Give it a year, maybe less, and a pitch might spend as much time proving a video shows up when…

AI & Automation

Robinhood’s Abhishek Fatehpuria on winning the modern financial consumer at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

Robinhood’s Abhishek Fatehpuria on winning the modern financial consumer at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Register now to save up to $200 before September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Researchers used Anthropic’s Claude to hack into OpenAI

Security researchers used Anthropic’s Claude to exploit vulnerabilities in OpenAI’s systems, taking over employee accounts and gaining access to an internal code…

The clock is ticking: Final 24 hours to exhibit at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

Last day to book your exhibit table at Disrupt is today, September 18. Get your startup in front of 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders on October…

Crusoe raises $3.9B to build massive data centers and small modular ‘AI factories’

The round values the data center giant at $30.9 billion.

Google DeepMind launches institute to widen the AGI debate

The new institute aims to surface differing views between Google, Google DeepMind, and the broader global research community around AGI. "They will not always agree, and…

PrismML hopes its tiny LLM will change how we all use AI

If AI lab PrismML isn't on your radar yet, it should be.

The FAA’s plan to fix air traffic? $875M worth of AI

A new AI-based software program is being launched to help air traffic controllers better navigate their jobs as the crossing guards of America's skies.

The fix for rogue AI agents could be more AI

As companies hand off longer and more complex tasks to AI agents, they are running into an oversight problem: Agents can act faster, longer, and at greater volume than…

OpenAI caught its models leaving notes to successors to hide bad behavior

OpenAI disclosed instances of GPT-5.6 Sol instructing future contexts to conceal mistakes and misaligned behavior, highlighting the growing challenge of detecting…

Is the AI safety debate about safety or control?

Not everyone agrees with Amodei's call for globally coordinated action for AI safety.

UN turns to Google to make its global data ready for AI agents

The shift comes after a UNICEF test found leading AI models struggled to accurately retrieve global development statistics.

Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal

Newly unsealed court filings show Microsoft privately called OpenAI's data practices "theft" while both companies scraped paywalled Times content, built datasets from…