Cloudflare
Cloudflare is an internal CDN bot with no publicly identified operator. It performs health checks, prefetching, SSL probes, or other infrastructure tasks. It is rarely user-facing.
Almost always safe to allow. Most CDNs need their own probes to make routing decisions, and blocking them can cause performance regressions or false alarms in the CDN's own monitoring.
If you are not on this CDN, the traffic should be near-zero, and you can investigate why it is hitting you.
See Cloudflare on your own site
Match the User-Agent header on incoming requests against the pattern below.
regex
For higher confidence, also verify the source IP against the operator's published ranges. UA strings can be spoofed; IP ownership is harder to fake.
Renders JavaScript
No
IP verification
User-Agent only
Crawl frequency
Scheduled probes
Honors robots.txt
Yes
Honors Crawl-delay
Varies
Should I let Cloudflare through?
In most cases, yes. Internal infrastructure traffic. Blocking can break CDN routing and monitoring. If volume gets noisy, rate-limit it before you block it outright.
Does blocking Cloudflare affect my Google rankings?
No. Cloudflare is not a search-engine crawler. Your ranking on Google or Bing is unaffected by what you do here.
How do I confirm a request is really from Cloudflare?
Look at the User-Agent header in your access logs and match it against the strings listed above. Worth knowing that the User-Agent is easy to fake, so this check tells you "the traffic claims to be Cloudflare", not "the traffic is genuinely Cloudflare". If you need stronger guarantees, look for a reverse-DNS check or wait for the operator to publish IP ranges.
What's the best way to understand what Cloudflare is doing on my site?
Look at which URLs it hits, how often, and what time of day. The request pattern usually tells you whether it's building an index, watching for a specific change, or trying to pull data in bulk. The User-Agent name alone rarely tells the full story.
Why can't I tell who operates Cloudflare?
Some bots run under generic User-Agent strings or are operated by smaller, less-documented companies. The pragmatic default is to treat unverified operators as untrusted traffic. If volume climbs, log the source IPs and check whether they cluster around a single network or ASN. That'll usually surface who's actually behind it.
What's the cleanest way to control Cloudflare?
Two layers. Robots.txt for the polite crawlers that read it, and rules at your CDN or edge for the ones that don't. Rankly's Agent Experience handles both from a single config, so you can allow, block, rate-limit, or serve a stripped-down version per bot. Agent Analytics handles the observation half so you know which bots are actually worth a rule.