Monday, July 14

🌟 Today’s Highlights:

• xAI launched its Grok 4 model

• OpenAI quietly added Shopify as a shopping search partner

• Finally, an eCommerce-driven solution for web analytics

• 📊 Stat of the Day: 70% of U.S shoppers say they’re making “significant” changes to their everyday habits in 2025. (Source: Gartner)

• 💡 Today’s Insight: How Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl affects SEO

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⚡️ Today’s Headlines ⚡️

🦾 xAI launched Grok 4. The new AI model is the latest version of xAI’s foundational system, built on the back of xAI’s Colossus data cluster that utilizes up to 100k Nvidia H100 GPUs to power its responses.

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🌅 Google Ads is sunsetting API v18 on August 20. Developers must upgrade to a newer version to avoid disruptions and any applications still using this version after that date will see API requests fail.

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🤫 OpenAI quietly added Shopify as a shopping search partner. The addition of Shopify as a third-party search partner to power its OpenAI ChatGPT shopping search was not formally announced but tucked into search documentation.

💡 Today’s Insight 💡

How Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl affects SEO

🗞 TL;DR - AI crawlers have led to a dramatic drop in site traffic, declines in ad revenue, and major threats to SEO models that have powered the web for decades. Fighting back is Cloudflare with their new Pay Per Crawl model, a first-of-its-kind monetization layer that lets publishers charge AI bots for accessing their content.

💡 Insight - How does Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl approach work?

Every time an AI crawler requests content, the server can respond with an HTTP 402 Payment Required including the price for access. If the crawler agrees to pay, it sends a follow-up request with a payment header and the server returns the content with a 200 OK response. If it doesn’t agree to pay, no access is granted.

Within the Cloudflare dashboard, site owners can set one of three access rules for each individual AI crawler: Allow (grants full HTTP 200 access), Charge (require payment per HTTP 402 request with price info), or Block (deny access with HTTP 403).

How will Pay Per Crawl impact SEO?

Well, implementing the feature might cause you to block Google or Bing, which risks a huge slice of valuable organic traffic. While Cloudflare won’t block BingBot, Googlebot, or any traditional search engine crawlers by default, this is the first time publishers have gotten the option to control how traditional search engine crawlers meet their website. Since it’s never been done before, it’s hard to know how much it will be implemented and if it actually poses a threat to how search engines operate.

That said, it is expected to have a major impact on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) as more websites opt into limiting access, in large part because GEO is about whether the model knows, trusts, and understands your site. Sites that aren’t visible during AI model training won’t become part of the model’s “mental map.”

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