Cloudflare is grading Verified bots on how they handle a 429. The scores will go public.
By Lior AharonovFounder, 7IT Solutions ·
On 16 October 2026 Cloudflare described a system that checks over time whether Verified bots honor site preferences: it compares bot traffic with robots.txt rules and watches whether a bot slows down after an HTTP 429. Each bot gets an explainable trust band. Cloudflare uses it internally for now and says it will share the scores publicly on Radar.
If your agent or MCP client fetches sites at scale, a 429 is now a graded moment. Cloudflare says site owners will be able to pick the trust threshold that decides how Verified bot traffic is handled, so a bot that ignores the signal may be treated worse.
Check that your agent's HTTP client backs off on every 429 and reads robots.txt before it fetches a site. Count the 429s your agents received this week.
Politeness just became a score. The agents that back off at the first 429 are the ones sites will keep letting in.
Lior Aharonov · my takeSources
- Continuous accountability for Verified bots (Cloudflare blog) blog.cloudflare.com
Researched with AI tools; every fact is checked against the linked sources.