Bots - New options to manage AI traffic

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Not all AI traffic is the same. Now, all customers — including those on the Free plan — can manage AI crawlers based on what they actually do on your site. Cloudflare groups AI traffic into three behaviors you can control independently: Search, Agent, and Training. This lets you keep the automated traffic that sends readers and revenue back to you, while blocking the traffic that only takes from your content.

Each behavior maps to a real use case. Search covers crawlers that index your content so they can answer questions about it later, where you should expect referral traffic or other equitable compensation in return. Agent covers automated activity acting in real time on a person's behalf, such as chat fetch bots and browser-use agents. Training covers crawlers that take your content to train or fine-tune a model. For each preset you can choose to block on all pages, block only on pages that display ads, or choose not to block.

Starting September 15, 2026, new domains onboarding to Cloudflare receive updated defaults: Bots classified as Training or as Agent are blocked on pages that display ads, while Search remains allowed. On that date, multi-purpose crawlers that combine Search and Training will be affected by the new defaults to block Training. All customers can opt out of the new defaults at any time before September 15.

Bots - More visibility into bot traffic with BotBase and Attribution Business Insights

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

With Content Independence Day 2026, Enterprise Bot Management customers get two new tools that make bot traffic far easier to see and reason about: BotBase, a searchable directory of every bot Cloudflare tracks, and Attribution Business Insights, a dashboard that shows how much value each crawler sends back to your business.

BotBase is Cloudflare's directory of all known bots and agents, available directly in the dashboard. It shows how Cloudflare classifies each bot by behavior — Search, Agent, Training, and other categories such as Transact, Data Collection, SEO, and Ads Verification — so you can understand why a given crawler is visiting you. You can search and filter the full catalogue, filter your own traffic down to a single bot to investigate its activity on your zone, and copy any bot's detection ID to target it precisely in Security rules. Every tracked bot in BotBase is also published in Cloudflare Radar's bots and agents directory.

Attribution Business Insights is built for content owners and business decision-makers who want to know which bots help or harm their business, without reading rule syntax. The dashboard reports crawl-to-referral ratios both site-wide and per bot operator — comparing how often a company crawls your content against how many visitors it actually refers back — over the last 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days. Each operator is labeled with Cloudflare's updated classification and an action status of Allowed, Blocked, or Partially blocked, giving stakeholders a shared, at-a-glance view of the AI traffic reaching your site.

Cloudflare changelogs | Bots

Bots - New options to manage AI traffic

Bots - More visibility into bot traffic with BotBase and Attribution Business Insights