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Bot Fight Mode

Bot Fight Mode is a simple, free product that helps detect and mitigate bot traffic on your domain. When enabled, the product:

  • Identifies traffic matching patterns of known bots
  • Issues computationally expensive challenges that force the requesting client to perform CPU-intensive calculations, increasing the cost for bots to send automated requests
  • Notifies Bandwidth Alliance ↗ partners (if applicable) to disable bots

Considerations

Bot Fight Mode and Super Bot Fight Mode use the same underlying technology that powers our Bot Management ↗ product. Specifically, these products:

  • Protect entire domains without endpoint restrictions
  • Cannot be customized, adjusted, or reconfigured via WAF custom rules

Although these products are designed to fight malicious actors on the Internet, they may challenge API or mobile app traffic. For more granular control, upgrade to Bot Management for Enterprise.

Interaction with other app security features

If you are using several app security features like custom rules, Managed Rules, and Bot Fight Mode, it is important to understand how these features interact and the order in which they execute. Refer to Security features interoperability for more information.

Enable Bot Fight Mode

To start using Bot Fight Mode:

  1. In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to the Security Settings page.

    Go to Settings

  2. Filter by Bot traffic.

  3. Go to Bot fight mode.

  4. Turn Bot fight mode on.

Disable Bot Fight Mode

If you find that Bot Fight Mode is causing problems with your application traffic, you may want to disable it.

To disable Bot Fight Mode:

  1. In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to the Security Settings page.

    Go to Settings

  2. Filter by Bot traffic.

  3. Go to Bot Fight Mode.

  4. Turn Bot Fight Mode off.

Block AI bots

Refer to Block AI bots.

Visibility

You can see bot-related actions by going to Security > Events. Any requests challenged by this product will be labeled Bot Fight Mode in the Service field. This allows you to observe, analyze, and follow trends in your bot traffic over time.

Limitations

Rules

You cannot bypass or skip Bot Fight Mode using WAF custom rules or Page Rules. This is because Bot Fight Mode does not run on the Ruleset Engine — it operates in a separate evaluation pipeline where Skip, Bypass, and Allow actions have no effect.

If you need to create exceptions for specific traffic (for example, your own API clients or monitoring tools), use Super Bot Fight Mode instead. Super Bot Fight Mode runs on the Ruleset Engine and supports Skip rules.

Bot Fight Mode can still trigger if you have IP Access rules, but it will not trigger if an IP Access rule matches the request first.

JavaScript Detections

For Bot Fight Mode customers, JavaScript Detections is automatically enabled and cannot be disabled.

If you have a Content Security Policy (CSP), you need to take additional steps to implement JavaScript Detections:

  • Ensure that anything under /cdn-cgi/challenge-platform/ is allowed. Your CSP should allow scripts served from your origin domain (script-src self).
  • For nonce script tags:

    • If your CSP uses a nonce for script tags, Cloudflare will add these nonces to the scripts it injects by parsing your CSP response header.

    • If your CSP does not use nonce for script tags and JavaScript Detections is enabled, you may see a console error such as Refused to execute inline script because it violates the following Content Security Policy directive: "script-src 'self'". Either the 'unsafe-inline' keyword, a hash ('sha256-b123b8a70+4jEj+d6gWI9U6IilUJIrlnRJbRR/uQl2Jc='), or a nonce ('nonce-...') is required to enable inline execution. We highly discourage the use of unsafe-inline and instead recommend the use CSP nonces in script tags which we parse and support in our CDN.