Cloudflare Now Shows Which AI Agents Browse Your Site
In short
- Cloudflare added a “Personal Assistants” category to Security Analytics on 4 November, so you can see AI agents browsing for people.
- Per agent you now choose Allow, Block on pages with ads, or Block.
- Example math: agents replacing 10% of visits on a €250/month ad site cost about €300 a year.
People now send AI assistants to browse the web for them. Until this week, your analytics lumped those visits in with everything else. Cloudflare changed that on 4 November, and it gives you a switch per agent.
What happened
Cloudflare launched analytics for personal-agent traffic and finer access policies. In Security Analytics there is a new Bot Analysis category called “Personal Assistants”. A widget lists which agents visit your site and how many requests each makes. Click one agent and you see its paths, status codes and networks.
The old Agents policy is now “AI Crawler and Agent access policies”. For each supported personal agent you pick one of three options: Allow, Block on pages with ads, or Block. Search and Training policies stay as they were. When you add a new zone, Cloudflare asks whether you monetise pages with ads and recommends a policy based on your answer.
One more piece is in early access: Account Abuse Protection. It shows which agents act on behalf of your logged-in users and how many accounts use them. If one account misbehaves, you can write a WAF rule on that user’s hashed ID instead of blocking the agent for everybody.
The post gives no pricing or plan tiers, and it does not list which agents are supported. Check your own dashboard before you plan around it.
How to use it
Open Security Settings and look at the new policy first. Then open Security Analytics and read the Personal Assistants widget for a week. Decide per agent, not per feeling.
- Content site with no ads: allow agents. They send readers who already trust the assistant.
- Ad-funded site: use “Block on pages with ads”. Agents read the page, nobody sees the ad.
- Shop or service with logins: ask for the Account Abuse Protection early access and watch which accounts are driven by agents.
Do the math (an example, not Cloudflare data): 50,000 monthly pageviews at €5 per 1,000 ad views is €250 a month. If agents quietly replace 10% of your human visits, that is 5,000 views, or €25 a month, or €300 a year. Now you can see the number instead of guessing.
What it means
Agents are becoming a normal kind of visitor, like search bots once were. The sites that measure them first will negotiate better, whether that is blocking, allowing or charging. The sites that ignore them will find out from the revenue line.
Ivan’s Take
I would turn this on today and just read the numbers for a week. On content sites I would allow agents, because they bring buyers. On anything that lives on ads, I would use the ad-page block. Free visibility beats a blind guess.
Source: Cloudflare
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