Agent Ready Crawlers

The field guide to every AI crawler and agent at the door, and the vendors who decide who gets in.

How Cloudflare's verified bot list works

In short

Operators submit bots through BotBase; Cloudflare validates them by Web Bot Auth or IP and classifies their behaviour; site owners write rules on the verified category. Verified bots must validate with Web Bot Auth or IP validation; since 2026-07-01 signed agents sit under the verified bot umbrella. Cloudflare's behaviour taxonomy has 11 entries including Search, Agent, Training and Transact.

Cloudflare's verified list is the closest thing to a shared register of good bots. How a bot gets on it decides what your rules can trust.

In practice

  1. A bot operator submits through BotBase. BotBase for Operators (2026-08-28) added submission status, editing and a behaviour model for operators.
  2. Cloudflare validates the bot by Web Bot Auth or by IP validation. Since 2026-07-01 signed agents sit under the verified bot umbrella.
  3. Cloudflare classifies the bot's behaviour. Its taxonomy has 11 entries, including Search, Agent, Training and Transact.
  4. You write rules on the verified category or on a specific bot. OpenAI documents the identifiers for its Cloud browser: bot tag chatgpt-agent and detection ID 129220581.
  5. Check Radar for the status of a given bot. Cloudflare Radar lists GPTBot and ChatGPT agent as Verified (read 2026-11-04); the same page for other bots was not confirmed in our reading.

What the sources say

Sources

Last reviewed 2026-11-04