Continuous accountability for Verified bots

Cloudflare is introducing a system to continuously evaluate whether Verified Bots remain trustworthy after their identities have been authenticated through Web Bot Auth and listed in BotBase. Rather than treating verification as a permanent endorsement, the system distinguishes momentary request risk from trust built through sustained behavior, assessing whether bots honor website preferences in robots.txt and respond appropriately to HTTP 429 “Too Many Requests” signals by slowing or pausing traffic. Repeated disregard for crawling restrictions, rate limits, or direct feedback can lower a bot’s explainable trust band, while consistent compliance can strengthen it; Cloudflare cites its 2025 removal of Perplexity’s bot from the Verified Bot list as an example of enforcement after alleged attempts to bypass site controls. Cloudflare plans to publish these trust assessments on Radar, expand the signals used over time, and eventually let customers select trust thresholds for handling Verified Bot traffic through its Bot Management and Bot Preference Sync tools.

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