Attribution Business Insights: dashboard to measure and act on AI crawlers
Key Points
- Attribution Business Insights dashboard released
- Crawl-to-referral ratios by operator (24h/7d/30d)
- Investigate in dashboard; act via Security rules
Summary
Cloudflare launched the Attribution Business Insights dashboard (available to Cloudflare Bot Management customers) to give publishers and engineers business-grade visibility into bot traffic. The dashboard surfaces bot vs human traffic, site-wide and per-operator crawl-to-referral ratios, top-bot breakdowns (volume, country, bandwidth, allow/block state), and updated crawler taxonomy (Training, Search, Agent). It’s intended as an analytics hub for investigation; actions (block, rate-limit, rules) are taken in the existing Security rules engine.
Key Points
- Bot vs human traffic and volume to content pages shown out of the box.
- Crawl-to-referral ratios (24h, 7d, 30d) provided site-wide and per bot operator to identify extractive crawlers.
- Top bots list includes country, bandwidth usage, and current allow/block status.
- Crawler taxonomy: classifies actors by intent (Training, Search, Agent) rather than a single “AI Crawler” label.
- Per-operator drilldowns expose type, crawl-to-referral ratio, and the current action so you can triage high-impact crawlers.
- Dashboard is analytics-only; to change behavior you create or update Security rules in Bot Management.
- Roadmap: per-article crawler visibility to show which content pieces attract the most AI scraping.
Practical next steps for engineers
- Enable Cloudflare Bot Management and open Attribution Business Insights.
- Scan for operators with high crawl-to-referral ratios and disproportionate bandwidth use.
- Create test Security rules (rate limits, block, challenge) for identified operators and monitor impact.
- Export operator metrics to support business/licensing conversations with AI companies.
- Plan to incorporate upcoming per-article views into monitoring and content protection alerts.