One percent of a network, millions of new pages

Cloudflare and OpenAI have published early results from a research pilot begun in July 2026, which tested whether signals from Cloudflare's network could help ChatGPT users discover content more efficiently. The participating cohort was about 1 percent of Cloudflare's total network, and the companies say it enabled OpenAI to discover and index hundreds of millions of new web pages.

The reasoning behind it concerns the kind of page search has always handled badly. The web is full of specifics: the manual for one washing machine model, the current passport requirements and fees, a local restaurant's latest menu and opening hours. Finding the right one can be the difference between a wrong answer and a useful one, and such pages can be valuable even if few other sites link to them, which is exactly what link-based discovery misses.

The division of labour is worth noting for anyone thinking about their own site. Cloudflare's network provides signals that help OpenAI's search crawler find more useful pages; OpenAI then independently evaluates and ranks how those pages appear, based on how relevant and helpful they are. Cloudflare describes the result as a feedback loop that can improve both discovery and the quality of the information people find.

The framing of discoverability is the part publishers should read twice. In the previous version of the web the job was reaching the top of a results page, and the visitor decided the rest. Where people rely on an assistant to find information and complete tasks, the system has to find the right source, work out what is useful, and then connect the person to it through an answer, a citation or a visit. Cloudflare notes that ChatGPT Search links back to sources, which is the only route by which any of this reaches the site itself.