Bots

A bot is a software application programmed to do certain tasks.

Bots can be used for good (chatbots, search engine crawlers) or for evil (inventory hoarding, credential stuffing).

AI crawlers and agents interact with your site for very different reasons, and you may want to treat those reasons differently. Rather than relying on a single "AI bot" label, Cloudflare classifies bots by behavior — what a bot does on your site — so you can allow the behavior that helps your business and block the behavior that harms it. A single bot can have more than one behavior.

Cloudflare lets all customers manage three AI-related use cases directly:

Behavior	What it does
Search	Collects or indexes your content so it can answer questions about it later.
Agent	Automated activity acting in real time on a person's behalf to get something done, such as chat fetch bots and browser-use agents.
Training	Crawls your content to train or fine-tune a model, permanently absorbing your data into the model.

Cloudflare classifies other behaviors, too — refer to Verified bots.