Cloudflare introduces system to continuously evaluate whether Verified bots honor site preferences

Cloudflare has launched a system that continuously monitors whether Verified bots respect site preferences, moving beyond identity verification to ongoing behavioral trust. It evaluates whether bots honor robots.txt rules per RFC 9309 and adapt to HTTP 429 rate-limit responses, producing an explainable "trust band" based on sustained patterns rather than isolated incidents. Cloudflare cites delisting Perplexity's bot in 2025 for circumventing opt-out controls. Scores will eventually be published on Radar, and customers will be able to set trust thresholds for handling Verified bot traffic. The system complements Bot Preference Sync and Bot Management in an accountability loop for automated traffic.

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