Detect a Challenge Page response

Detect a Challenge Page response

When a request encounters a Cloudflare Challenge Page instead of the originally anticipated response, the Challenge Page response (regardless of the Challenge Page type) will have the cf-mitigated header present and set to challenge. This header can be leveraged to detect if a response was challenged when making fetch/XHR requests. This header provides a reliable way to identify whether a response is a Challenge or not, enabling a web application to take appropriate action based on the result. For example, a front-end application encountering a response from the backend may check the presence of this header value to handle cases where Challenge Pages encountered unexpectedly.

Note

Regardless of the requested resource-type, the content-type of a Challenge will be text/html.

For the cf-mitigated header, challenge is the only valid value. The header is set for all Challenge Page types.

To illustrate, here is a JavaScript code snippet that demonstrates how to use the cf-mitigated header to detect whether a response was challenged:

fetch("/my-api-endpoint").then((response) => {
  if (response.headers.get("cf-mitigated") === "challenge") {
    // Handle challenged response
  } else {
    // Process response as usual
  }
});

For additional help, refer to our FAQ.