Block requests by Bot Fight Mode and Block AI Bots

General Rules
1

What is the name of the domain?

a secure website using Cloudflare

What is the issue you’re encountering

Bot Fight Mode and Block AI Bots query

What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?

I have a website with a WAF that has existing custom rule checks such as disallow known bots.
If I were to enable the Bots checkboxes Bot Fight Mode and Block AI Bots would the active custom rules still work?

2

Your custom WAF rules are processed before Bot Fight Mode, as outlined here. This means:

  1. Requests blocked by your custom WAF rule can’t be allowed by the Bot Fight Mode phase.
  2. Requests allowed by your custom WAF rules can still be blocked by Bot Fight Mode, unless you implement a skip rule (if your plan allows it).
3

Thanks, it sounds like the custom WAF rules and Bot Fight Mode could conflict with each other,

I note that under the Analytics there a ‘Mitigated by WAF’ value that matches the number of blocks from the WAF custom rules. However is there a way to know the total number of requests blocked by Cloudflare? Does the free WAF by default block some requests?

So for example, for the four values:

Total
Mitigated by WAF
Served by Cloudflare
Served by origin

If Total is all requests to a website, and ‘Mitigated by WAF’ are blocked requests by the WAF, what other requests are blocked of any?

Thanks

5

Can AI audit feature block “Unknown AI crawlers” ? Here they only mention Known AI crawlers… I assume they will start detecting crawlers in general and block them unless they are allowlisted .
Thanks
Kaiomarz Engineer

6

From Bots · Cloudflare bot solutions docs, all verified bots that are classified as AI Search, AI Assistant, AI Crawler, or an Archiver, as well as a number of unverified bots that fall into the verified bot categories are blocked.