Cloudflare's verified bots program is a terrible idea. They want to be the central chokepoint for agents, and they're doing it in shady ways like auto enrolling customers into blocking agents.
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This press release today is a better statement of _why_ this feature exists (as opposed to the submission link, which is nuts-and-bolts of implementing): https://blog.cloudflare.com/signed-agents/
Web Bot Auth is a way for bots to self-identify cryptographically. Unlike the user agent header (which is trivially spoofed) or known IPs (painful to manage), Web Bot Auth uses HTTP Message Signatures using the bot's key, which should be published at some well-known location.
This is a good thing! We want bots to be able to self-identify in a way that can't be impersonated. This gives website operators the power to allow or deny well-behaved bots with precision. It doesn't change anything about bots who try to hide their identity, who are not going to self-identify anyways.
It's worth reading the proposal on the details: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-web-bot-... . Nothing about this is limited to Cloudflare.
I'm also working on support for Web Bot Auth for our Agent Identification project at Stytch https://www.isagent.dev . Well-behaved bots benefit from this self-identification because it enables a better Agent Experience: https://stytch.com/blog/introducing-is-agent/
They can offer what they want for bots. But stop ruining the experience for humans first.
I suspect I'm missing something, what am I missing?
1. THey have already proven to be a bad faith actor with their "DDoS protection."
2. This is pretty much the typical Cloudflare HN playbook. They release soemthing targeted at the current wave and hide behind an ideological barrier; meanwhile if you try to use them for anything serious they require a call with sales who jumps you with absurdly high pricing.
Do other cloud providers charge high fees for things they have no business charging for? Absolutely. But they typically tell you upfront and don't run ideological narratives.
This is not a company we should be putting much trust in, especially not with their continued plays to become the gatekeepers of the internet.
There is a whole segment of tech designed around helping you understand and manage cloud costs, through consultations, automations, etc. It has spawned companies and career paths!
i'm sure the next step here will be a cloudflare product that sits in front of your website and blocks all bot traffic except for the bots that are verified to have paid for access. (or maybe that already exists?)
The standard looks fine as a distributed protocol until you have to register to pay a rent to Cloudflare, which they say will eventually trickle down into publishers pocket but you know what having a middleman this powerful means to the power dynamics of the market. Publishers have a really bad hand no matter what we do to save them, content as we know it will have to adapt.
Give it a couple more iterations and some MBA will come up with the brilliant idea of introducing an internet toll to humans and selling a content bundle with unlimited access to websites.
The internet was designed to work the way it does for good reasons.
You not understanding those reasons is not an excuse for allowing a giant tech company to step in and be the gatekeeper for a huge portion of the internet. Nor to monetize, enshittify, balkanize, and fragment the web with no effective recourse or oversight.
Cloudflare shouldn't be allowed to operate, in my view.
2) Then don't use them? Either they provide enough value to pay them or they don't.
Web operators choose to use them; hell they even pay Cloudflare to be between them. Seriously I just think you don't understand how bad it is to run a site without someone in-front of it.
They did exactly that, they just outsourced it to cloudflare. The problem became bad enough that a lot of other people did the same thing.
If your argument is "companies shouldn't be allowed to outsource components to other companies, or cloudflare specifically", then sure, but good luck ever enforcing that.
A practical flow:
1. Bot self-identifies (Web Bot Auth)
2. Fetch policy
3. Accept terms or negotiate (HTTP 402 exists)
4. Present a signed receipt proving consent/payment
5. Origin/CDN verifies receipt and grants access
That keeps things decentralized: identity is transport; policy stays with the site; receipts provide auditability, no single gatekeeper required. There’s ongoing work in this direction (e.g., PEAC using /.well-known/peac.txt) that aims to pair Web Bot Auth with site-controlled terms and verifiable receipts.
Disclosure: I work on PEAC, but the pattern applies regardless of implementation.
The age of agents: cryptographically recognizing agent traffic
A way to authenticate identity for crawlers so I can allow-list ones I want to get in, exempt them from turnstile/captcha, etc -- is something I need.
I'm not following what makes this controversial. Cryptographic verification of identity for web requests, sounds right.
Thing is, my browser isn’t configured that way. So works well, I guess.
Are you somehow under the impression that Cloudflare is forcing their service on other companies? They’re not stepping in, the people who own those sites have decided paying them is a better deal than building their own alternatives.
It is only useful for whitelisting bots, not for banning bad ones, as bad ones can rotate keys.
Whitelisting clients by identity is the death of the open web, and means that nobody will ever be able to compete with capital on even footing.
In the end, only people with non-mainstream browsers (or using VPN to escape country-level blocks, or Tor, or noJS) suffer.
It's like how anti-piracy measures only affect paying customers, while pirates ironically get a better experience. The best way to get around endless CAPTCHAs is to just use LLMs instead.
Obviously this technology is different but the same sort of result.
What's the end game here? All humans end up having to use a unique encryption key to prove their humanness also?