I am trying to figure out some random visits to my website that I am getting where the server REMOTE_ADDR is a Cloudflare IP address, which should never happen unless cloudflare is randomly crawling my websites? Interestingly, the USER AGENT is always the same which is iOS 15 and that is not even released yet for public use. So far these two IPs are what have triggered these visits(5 in total over the last week): 104.28.24.11, 104.28.13.119
Please help me understand what is going on here? I am not sure if this would be a function of the “Always Online” feature, and maybe Cloudflare is updating the cache? But the thing is that the URLs that Cloudflare is visiting are ONLY known/available to a person who has clicked one of my many Google Adwords search advertisements… The only thing I can think of is a real visitor is clicking through from Google ADs and maybe my website is down for some reason so Cloudflare shows the “Cached” always online page, but I don’t understand why the USER AGENT would always be the same when this happens: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 15_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/15.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
This is very likely users browsing using Cloudflare’s WARP+ (Introducing WARP: fixing mobile Internet performance and security) or other similar services built on the Cloudflare network - in other words, entirely normal and unrelated to ads.
For example, as I write this post, I’m using WARP+ and have an iOS 15 user agent as I’m part of the beta programme. I have that exact UA string.
One of the features in iOS 15 is iCloud Private Relay. All browser traffic from that feature will come through various large cloud operators, including Cloudflare and Fastly. The address ranges are available here.
Thank you for the responses. Very helpful! Though I hope in the future that much of the visitor web traffic is not going through anonymous IP nodes because it makes it impossible to validate many important things.
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