Cloudflare adds per-agent controls for personal AI agents
Cloudflare is giving site owners analytics on which personal AI agents visit their sites and per-agent access policies, so they can control agent traffic without blocking it outright and losing customers.
Cloudflare announced new analytics and access controls for "personal agents," the AI assistants that browse, search, and buy on a person's behalf. The company's pitch is that blocking all automated traffic can cost site owners real customers.
In Security Analytics, the Bot Analysis chart now has a Personal Assistants category alongside Verified Bot, Likely Human, Likely Automated, and Automated. A new Top statistics widget lists which agents are visiting and how many requests each sends. Filtering on a single agent shows the paths it requests, the status codes it gets back, and the networks it comes from. Cloudflare says the agent identification draws on its verified bot directory, which it describes as the largest in the world.
For sites using Account Abuse Protection, which is still in early access, fraud teams can see which user an agent is acting for. Login and sign-up events record whether an agent was involved and which one. Analysts can also block a single compromised account through a WAF rule on its Hashed User ID, leaving the agent available to everyone else who uses it.
On the policy side, Cloudflare is expanding the Agents setting it introduced this summer and renaming it AI Crawler and Agent access policies. Site owners can set an overall policy and then override it for each supported agent with one of three options: Allow, Block on pages with ads, or Block. Search and Training policies stay as they are. New zones get recommended defaults during onboarding, based on whether the site runs ads.
The post does not name which agents are supported. Cloudflare says its next step is privacy-aware ways to pass user context through agents, help sites assess agent reputation, and establish accountability when something goes wrong. It has not given a timeline.