Author: Julia Waldow

This article was first published by Digiday sibling Modern Retail.

Consumer brands and retailers aren’t sitting on the sidelines this March Madness.

Companies across sectors, from footwear to personal care, are racing to sign college basketball players and feature them in marketing materials as the NCAA tournament gets underway today. Earlier this month, Jordan Brand announced it was working with University of Connecticut shooting guard Azzi Fudd, while NYX Professional Makeup said it was joining forces with UCLA center Lauren Betts. On March 16, Freddy’s, a custard and burger chain, announced deals with 10 collegiate athletes in Arizona, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.

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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.

Last week, the company released a crawl API (its crawl endpoint within Cloudflare’s browser rendering API) that can scrape an entire website with one request. (You give it a URL, it crawls the whole site and returns the content in HTML, Markdown, or structured JSON). The announcement raised eyebrows and left some publishers confused and unsettled by the move to provide its own version of what it has so far protected publishers from. 

That sentiment was exacerbated by some publishers noticing how they couldn’t block Cloudflare’s own scraper when they tried to adjust their settings. One independent publisher Thomas Baekdal was particularly vocal, posting on LinkedIn that Cloudflare had “betrayed every single publisher” with this tool.   

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