Cloudflare will score Verified bots on whether they obey robots.txt and slow down when told to

Cloudflare introduced a system to evaluate and report when Verified bot behaviour deviates from the rules. It looks at two signals: whether a bot's traffic matches the site's published robots.txt preferences over time, and whether it slows down or pauses after an HTTP 429 Too Many Requests response. The results become an explainable trust band rather than a permanent verdict. Cloudflare says it is already using the system internally, plans to share the scores publicly on Cloudflare Radar, and intends to let all customers choose the trust threshold used to handle Verified bot traffic.

• Open your site's robots.txt address (yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and check it says what you want for search and AI crawlers. A bot can only be judged against rules you have published.
• If your site is on Cloudflare, look at Bot Management and Bot Preference Sync in the dashboard to see what is available on your plan.

Source: Cloudflare Blog. This is our short summary of their reporting. The paragraphs marked "Our read" and the things to do are SeedFoundry's opinion. The summary is drafted with AI tools. Image: Cloudflare Blog, from its own announcement. How we source and credit