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Search platforms historically crawled web sites with the implicit promise that, as the sites showed up in the results for relevant searches, they would send traffic on to those sites — in turn leading to ad revenue for the publisher. This model worked fairly well for several decades, with a whole industry emerging around optimizing content for optimal placement in search results. It led to higher click-through rates, more eyeballs for publishers, and, ideally, more ad revenue.

Search platforms historically crawled web sites with the implicit promise that, as the sites showed up in the results for relevant searches, they would send traffic on to those sites — in turn leading to ad revenue for the publisher. This model worked fairly well for several decades, with a whole industry emerging around optimizing content for optimal placement in search results. It led to higher click-through rates, more eyeballs for publishers, and, ideally, more ad revenue.

On the surface, the goal of handling bot traffic is clear: keep malicious bots away, while letting through the helpful ones. Some bots are evidently malicious — such as mass price scrapers or those testing stolen credit cards. Others are helpful, like the bots that index your website. Cloudflare has segmented this second category of helpful bot traffic through our verified bots program, vetting and validating bots that are transparent about who they are and what they do.