Research pilot combines Cloudflare's global network signals with OpenAI's frontier search capabilities
SAN FRANCISCO, July 08, 2026--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET), the leading connectivity cloud company, today announced Cloudflare and OpenAI are launching a first-of-its-kind research pilot to explore how insights from participating websites across Cloudflare's global network can help AI search engines discover and index relevant content on the open web more effectively. The pilot is specifically focused on improving the accuracy and timeliness of answers. By using Cloudflare's real-time network insights—such as content freshness, traffic quality, and actual page changes—the project aims to improve AI systems' indexing and crawling of the web.
"By sharing our sophisticated network signals, we can find a better way to make AI search more efficient and help people get quality answers faster," said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.
Cloudflare's global network, which more than 20% of the web sits behind, gives it a unique vantage point into how content changes and how traffic behaves in real time. OpenAI brings frontier models, a large-scale search and answer system, and real user queries to test. Together, the companies will examine how signal-driven crawling and indexing can improve accuracy and freshness in answers.
"Up-to-date information is important for delivering accurate answers to people using ChatGPT," said Nick Ryder, VP of Research at OpenAI. "Piloting this with Cloudflare will allow us to explore whether network-level insights can help us discover content more efficiently."
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. (NYSE: NET) is the leading connectivity cloud company. It empowers organizations to make their employees, applications and networks faster and more secure everywhere, while reducing complexity and cost. Cloudflare's connectivity cloud delivers the most full-featured, unified platform of cloud-native products and developer tools, so any organization can gain the control they need to work, develop, and accelerate their business.
Powered by one of the world's largest and most interconnected networks, Cloudflare blocks billions of threats online for its customers every day. It is trusted by millions of organizations – from the largest brands to entrepreneurs and small businesses to nonprofits, humanitarian groups, and governments across the globe.
Learn more about Cloudflare's connectivity cloud at cloudflare.com/connectivity-cloud. Learn more about the latest Internet trends and insights at radar.cloudflare.com.