AI search fix
Cloudflare rules for AI bots (safe)
Safe Cloudflare rules for AI bots use targeted allow or skip logic for trusted user-agents (for example GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Bingbot) while keeping broader bot protection for unknown traffic. The key is to avoid blanket 'allow all bots' policies and instead align WAF behavior with robots.txt intent. Configure custom rules, test status codes, and confirm requests reach origin. This improves crawl readiness but does not guarantee citations in AI products.
Most regressions happen after security changes: rules are added for one bot and silently block others. Maintain one documented AI bot policy and audit logs after each Cloudflare update.
Safe Cloudflare rule pattern
- Define the exact AI user-agents you want to allow by policy.
- Create WAF custom rules matching User-Agent for each trusted bot.
- Apply Skip/Allow for bot challenge layers, not global security bypass.
- Keep managed protections active for unknown and abusive automation.
- Validate with edge and origin logs to confirm 200/304 responses.
You'll get an HTML report on likely edge blocks and AI crawler policy mismatches.
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