TL;DR: Starting September 15, 2026, Cloudflare is overhauling how it lets AI crawlers and search bots access websites and if your hot tub or above-ground pool dealership doesn’t check its settings, you could unintentionally block Google and the AI assistants your future buyers are starting to lean on. You might be thinking your customers are too old-school for ChatGPT, but the research phase for a $6,000 spa purchase is exactly the kind of decision people are now asking AI to help them think through. This post breaks down what’s changing, why it matters even for a slower-moving, showroom-driven industry like yours, and what to check before the deadline hits.
Quick note before you dive in: this post is specifically about Cloudflare’s settings. If your dealership site isn’t running on Cloudflare, none of the action items below apply to you, and you can stop reading here.
“My Customers Aren’t Using AI” – Are You Sure?
Unless you’re loaded, buying a hot tub isn’t an impulse buy. It’s a research-heavy, months-long decision that usually starts with a Google search, moves through comparison shopping, and ends with someone walking into a showroom to sit in the water and feel the jets for themselves (if you wet test… if you don’t, you need to start doing this).
That long runway is exactly where AI tools are starting to show up, even for buyers who’d never call themselves “AI users.” Someone Googling “best hot tub for arthritis and joint pain” or asking their phone “what size swim spa fits a family of four” is increasingly getting an AI-generated answer before they ever see a list of blue links. They might not know they’re using AI , they just know they typed a question and got a helpful answer. If your dealership’s website isn’t part of what fed that answer, you never entered the conversation.
Your buyers may not be early adopters. But the tools shaping how they search already are.
What’s Actually Changing on September 15
Cloudflare protects a huge share of the websites on the internet (upwards of 60% – that number shocked me), including a lot of dealer sites, from bad bots and scrapers. Up until now, site owners had one blunt setting: block AI bots entirely, or allow them entirely.
That’s going away.
Cloudflare is now sorting crawlers into three categories based on intent:
- Search: Bots that read your site so it can appear in search results and AI-generated answers
- Agent: Bots completing a specific task for a real person, like an AI assistant pulling up your warranty details for someone who asked about it
- Training: Bots gathering content to train the AI models themselves
The catch: starting September 15, new defaults will block both Training and Agent bots on any page carrying ads, unless a dealer changes that setting. This applies automatically to new Cloudflare accounts, newly added sites, and anyone on Cloudflare’s free plan.
There’s a second wrinkle that matters even more for dealers who don’t think much about AI at all: Google’s own crawler, Googlebot, does double duty; it handles both traditional search indexing and AI training in a single bot. If your settings are configured to block Training crawlers, the strictest rule wins, which means you can accidentally block Googlebot too. That’s not a hypothetical AI problem anymore. That’s your dealership disappearing from Google Search.
A Word on Cloudflare’s “Get Paid for Your Content” Pitch
Part of Cloudflare’s pitch here is that dealers and publishers will finally get paid when AI platforms pull from their content, instead of having it used for free. It sounds good on paper. We wouldn’t count on it working out that way.
The more realistic outcome: if a dealership tries to charge an AI platform for access to its site, the AI platform isn’t going to pay… It’s just going to stop citing that dealership and start recommending the competitor down the road who left their site open. So the dealer holding out for a payday doesn’t get one. It’s honestly a big pipe dream that isn’t ever going to happen. They get replaced in the answer, and the buyer who asked “which hot tub dealer near me has the best financing” gets pointed somewhere else. Trying to protect your content ends up handing your competitor the lead, the showroom visit, and the sale you were trying to hold onto.
Why This Matters More For a Showroom Business, Not Less
There’s a temptation to assume this is a tech-industry problem, or something ecommerce brands need to worry about but a local hot tub dealer doesn’t. It’s actually the opposite.
Because of the anxiety and complexity of buying a high-ticket item, like a hot tub, your sales cycle depends on educating a buyer long before they ever call your store or drive to your showroom. Financing questions, energy cost comparisons, “hot tub vs. swim spa,” chemical maintenance concerns, sizing for a small backyard – these are exactly the questions people now ask ChatGPT to walk them through, the same way they’d ask a knowledgeable salesperson. If your site has good, clear answers to those questions and the crawlers can actually reach them, you get positioned as the trusted source before the buyer ever picks a dealer. Block the crawlers, and someone else’s dealership answers those questions instead.
What Our Head of Digital Wants Every Dealer to Understand
Our Head of Digital, Kristen Ravesloot, sees this misunderstanding constantly with dealer clients:
“So many hot tub and pool dealers we talk to think of Googlebot and the AI crawlers as competitors sniffing around their content, trying to take something from them. That mindset is backwards. When you let them crawl and actually understand your site, you’re handing them what they need to recommend your dealership by name when someone asks which hot tub is right for their backyard or their bad back. That’s brand awareness, that’s a warm lead walking into your showroom already sold on you, and that’s a sale. Block that access, and you can watch your visibility vanish almost overnight, not just in AI answers, but in Google too. It’s just a bad idea.”
That’s the piece dealers miss. This isn’t about chasing a trend. It’s about whether you’re still the one answering the buyer’s questions when they’re three months out from a purchase decision.
What This Means for Your Dealership Site
If your website runs on Cloudflare and carries any ads or ad-supported content, blog posts, buying guides, or comparison pages, those are the pages most exposed by the September 15 default. Your core product and financing pages may not be directly hit by this specific default, but the broader trend of accidental crawler-blocking can affect them too, depending on your current settings.
The larger opportunity is bigger than avoiding a block. It’s making sure that when a buyer in your area asks an AI assistant to recommend a hot tub dealer, your name is the one it knows.
Your Action Checklist
- Log into Cloudflare and review your bot settings. Check whether you’re still using the old all-or-nothing AI bot toggle.
- Set Search, Agent, and Training preferences on purpose instead of letting the September 15 default choose for you.
- Check your robots.txt file for a blanket block that might be shutting out crawlers without your knowledge.
- Confirm your CDN settings and robots.txt file agree. A firewall rule can silently override what your robots.txt says.
- Look at your server logs to verify Googlebot and major AI crawlers are actually reaching your site.
- Flag any ad-supported pages on your site; those carry the most exposure under the new default.
This doesn’t require a developer or an IT department. It takes about twenty minutes with the right checklist, so go get it done this week.
Frequently Asked Questions
My dealership isn’t on Cloudflare. Does any of this apply to me?
No. This checklist and the September 15 deadline are specific to Cloudflare. If your dealership site isn’t running through Cloudflare, you can skip this one.
Will this actually affect whether I show up in Google?
It can. If your settings end up blocking Googlebot because it’s a mixed-use crawler, your Google visibility can take a real hit — which is exactly why this is worth checking before the deadline, not after.
Should I just block the AI bots to keep them from using my content?
We’d caution against that. Blocking the bots that train AI models is a reasonable choice for some businesses, but blocking the bots that let AI assistants recommend and cite your dealership cuts you out of a discovery channel that’s only going to grow.
How would I even know if my site is accidentally blocking crawlers?
Check your robots.txt file directly and review your Cloudflare bot settings. If that’s not something you or your team feels confident reading, that’s exactly the kind of quick check we can run for you.
Is this something I check once and move on?
Not quite. New AI crawlers show up regularly and existing ones change how they identify themselves. Treat it as a quarterly check, not a one-time fix.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
