IAB Australia sorts AI crawlers into four access verdicts

IAB Australia published version 1.0 of its Bots and Crawler Guidance and Decision Matrix on July 22, 2026, unveiling it at the Discovery: AI and Search summit in Sydney on July 28, per PPC Land. The guidance sorts crawlers — search indexers, AI training bots, live AI agents, ad infrastructure, and unverified traffic — into one of four verdicts: allow, allow with conditions, require licensing, or block. It cites Cloudflare data showing automated requests crossed 57.5% of web traffic in June 2026, with 52% of AI crawler requests serving model training versus 2.6% for live queries, and directs publishers to prepare ahead of Cloudflare’s September 15 default block on training and agent crawlers.