Bot Management
Cloudflare Bot Management scores every request for the likelihood it comes from automation, letting you block scrapers, credential stuffing and inventory hoarding while keeping good bots and real users flowing.
Overview
Roughly a third to a half of internet traffic is automated. Some of it is welcome — search engine crawlers, uptime monitors, payment webhooks — but much of it scrapes content and prices, tests stolen credentials against login forms, hoards limited inventory, commits card fraud, or (increasingly) harvests content for AI training without permission.
Cloudflare Bot Management identifies automation on every request without making humans solve puzzles. It draws on signals from the tens of millions of properties behind Cloudflare's network, which is what makes its classifications hard for bot operators to evade at scale.
Key capabilities
- A bot score from 1 (definitely automated) to 99 (definitely human) attached to every request, usable in WAF and custom rules
- Machine-learning models trained on traffic across Cloudflare's global network, retrained continuously as bots evolve
- Heuristic and behavioural detection, plus JA3/JA4 TLS fingerprinting to identify tooling regardless of claimed user agent
- A verified-bots directory so search engines, monitoring services and other good bots are recognised and never blocked accidentally
- Dedicated controls for AI crawlers — allow, block, or manage them separately from other traffic
- Flexible enforcement: block, managed challenge, rate limit, or serve alternative content by score threshold
- Bot analytics showing score distributions, top automated paths, and the effect of your rules
- Simpler tiers — Bot Fight Mode and Super Bot Fight Mode — for lower plans
How it works
Every request receives a score computed at the edge by several cooperating systems: supervised machine-learning models trained on labelled attack traffic from across the network, heuristics that catch known-bad automation instantly, and an anomaly-detection layer that learns what normal traffic to your site looks like. Signals include TLS and HTTP fingerprints, header ordering, IP reputation, and behavioural patterns — not just the easily-forged user-agent string.
The score is exposed as a field you can use in rules. A typical policy blocks scores below 2 on all paths, challenges scores below 30 on login and checkout, and exempts verified bots and known partners. Because enforcement is expressed in ordinary rules, you can be surgical: protect the endpoints bots actually abuse without adding any friction elsewhere.
When a challenge is warranted, Cloudflare's managed challenge usually resolves invisibly in the browser — real users rarely see a puzzle.
Plans & licensing
Bot Fight Mode (a basic on/off deterrent) is available on the Free plan; Super Bot Fight Mode with more control ships with Pro and Business. The full Bot Management product — per-request scores, rule integration, verified-bot granularity and analytics — is an Enterprise add-on. As of 2026, subject to change — confirm current packaging with us.
Deployment with Integrity
As a certified Cloudflare partner for Central and Eastern Europe, Integrity delivers this product end to end — including a free pilot so you see results on your own traffic before committing. A typical rollout:
- Assessment. We identify which automated abuse actually affects you — scraping, credential stuffing, checkout abuse, AI crawling — and which good bots you depend on.
- Free pilot. Bot scoring is enabled in observation mode on a production zone; for two weeks we collect score distributions with zero enforcement.
- Policy design. Together we set thresholds per path group: strict on login and checkout, moderate on content, open for verified bots and your partners' automation.
- Gradual enforcement. Rules go live as challenges first, then blocks, endpoint by endpoint, with conversion and support-ticket metrics watched throughout.
- Tuning. False positives and newly-evolved bots are reviewed monthly; AI-crawler policy is set explicitly.
- Handover or managed service. Your team runs the policy with our runbook, or Integrity manages it continuously.
Ready to start? Contact us to arrange the free pilot.
FAQ
Will real customers get blocked or forced to solve CAPTCHAs?
A tuned deployment challenges only low-score traffic, and Cloudflare's managed challenge is usually invisible — no picture puzzles. We roll out with observation first and watch conversion metrics, so friction for humans stays effectively zero.
Can we block AI crawlers without hurting our Google ranking?
Yes. Verified search crawlers are identified separately from AI training crawlers, so you can allow Googlebot and Bingbot while blocking or managing AI data harvesters — this is now a standard, explicitly supported policy.
Sophisticated bots use residential proxies and real browsers. Does scoring still work?
Largely, yes. Residential proxies defeat IP reputation but not behavioural, TLS-fingerprint and ML signals derived from network-wide visibility. No system stops 100% of determined attackers, but the cost of evasion rises sharply — which is the practical goal.