Cloudflare BotBase for Operators: No More Black-Box Bot Submissions

Cloudflare is opening up its bot directory to the people who run the bots. Last month the company introduced BotBase, a searchable directory of known bots, plus Business Insights for site owners. Today it's adding the operator side: a dashboard section where bot operators can submit, track, edit, and see the review status of their bot entries.

The new home lives under Protect & Connect → Application Security → BotBase in the Cloudflare dashboard. It splits into three tabs: a browsable bots directory, a submission form, and a submission history view. The history tab is the big one — it shows each submitted bot with a status of Waiting for review, Accepted, or Rejected, and rejected entries include the reason and actionable steps. Previously, operators had to email support to learn anything about their submission.

Operators can now also edit an existing submission instead of resubmitting from scratch, and cancel a submission still in the queue. That matters because bot details change — a new IP list endpoint, a switch to Web Bot Auth, a rebrand — and keeping the directory accurate is what keeps a bot's Verified status meaningful.

The submission form itself was rebuilt around a behavior-based taxonomy rather than a single label. Operators now declare three things: what the bot does (indexing, acting on a user's behalf, training models, etc.), how it uses the content it reads (using the Content Signals model), and who operates it (direct or intermediary). This matches the model Cloudflare introduced on July 1, so site owners and bot operators are speaking the same language.

Review is no longer fully manual. Cloudflare says bot submissions have grown about 7x since 2023, so the team automated the checks: duplicate detection, user-agent specificity, and verification method validation (IP list fetch, reverse DNS, Web Bot Auth signature). Submissions that pass are tracked immediately; anything ambiguous gets routed to a human with the specific concern pre-flagged.

This is a transparency play. Cloudflare's goal is to make BotBase a two-sided ecosystem where site owners can make informed decisions and bot operators can be seen as legitimate. The next steps, per the post, are more features guided by visibility and operator feedback.