If you ticked a “block AI training” option on Cloudflare at some point, this is worth five minutes. Cloudflare’s docs (updated Nov 2) say training actions also apply to mixed-purpose crawlers used for both search and training. Their July blog post names Googlebot, Applebot and BingBot as examples.

There were reports in August of Googlebot getting 403s on sitemaps. Nobody has confirmed the cause as far as I can find, so don’t panic over it. It could be another setting entirely, Bot Fight Mode came up in the same thread.

Still, checking is cheap. Look at crawl stats in Search Console for a jump in 403s since mid-September, then read which Cloudflare setting is on. I’d rather spend five minutes on that than learn about it from a traffic graph.

Has anyone here actually seen this on their own site?