Cloudflare starts to give each Verified bot a trust band

Cloudflare started an internal system that checks if its Verified bots obey the rules of sites. The system gives each bot a trust band. The band shows how frequently the bot obeys the wishes of site owners. Cloudflare says all customers will get the system. They then can select the trust threshold for Verified bot traffic.

What it measures

The system uses these signals:

• The bot obeys the robots.txt file of the site.
• The bot decreases its speed after an HTTP 429 reply.

A robots.txt file tells bots which parts of a site they can crawl. A site sends an HTTP 429 reply to tell a bot to decrease its speed.

Cloudflare looks for patterns that occur again and again. One time that a bot does not obey is not important.

How the band changes

Trust increases when a bot decreases its speed or stops. Trust decreases when the bot ignores the reply again and again.

Cloudflare says the band can change.

An earlier case

In 2025, Cloudflare removed the bot of Perplexity from its Verified bots. Cloudflare says the bot tried to get access to sites that told bots not to collect their data. Cloudflare also says the bot tried to bypass the controls when the sites blocked it.

What comes next

Cloudflare says it will show the scores to all on Radar. It also will add more signals.