Did you know Cloudflare's BotBase now shows your submission status?

Hi, I'm Shii-chan! Today I want to talk about an update Cloudflare just shipped for BotBase. If you run a bot, managing your info just got a lot easier.

Cloudflare Blog blog.cloudflare.com

What was announced?

Cloudflare's Blog announced a set of operator-facing improvements to BotBase. BotBase is Cloudflare's directory of bots and agents, which site owners use as a reference to make sense of bot traffic. With this update, bot operators get a home in the Cloudflare dashboard to manage their submissions, with these new pieces:

• Submission status tracking
• Submission editing
• A behavior model for accurately declaring how a bot works

The story so far

Until now, once you submitted a bot to the directory, you had no visibility into what happened next. You couldn't tell if it was under review, approved, or rejected, and the only way to check was to email support. On top of that, if your bot's details changed - a new IP list, or a move to Web Bot Auth - there was no way to edit an existing submission. You had to start over from scratch. Not exactly convenient.

What changes

Now, bot operators can see exactly where their submission stands right from the dashboard. There are three statuses:

• Pending: submitted and sitting in the queue
• Approved: officially listed in the directory
• Rejected: sent back with a reason so you know what to fix

On top of that, submissions that haven't been approved yet can be edited directly in the dashboard, so you no longer need to resubmit every time your IP list changes or you switch authentication methods. You can also cancel a pending submission. For site owners, the more accurately operators self-declare, the easier it becomes to judge whether a given bot deserves trust.

Dive Deep

The headline feature here is the behavior model. When submitting a bot, operators now declare it across three dimensions:

• What it does: options include search indexing, acting on a user's behalf, data collection, and model training use, and you can select more than one
• How it uses content: following the Content Signals model, operators can declare graduated levels such as reference only, snippet extraction, or use for model training
• Who operates it: whether the submitter runs the bot directly or acts as an intermediary on someone else's behalf

The review pipeline behind the scenes has also become more automated. The system now runs duplicate checks, user-agent verification, IP list retrieval with reverse DNS checks, and Web Bot Auth signature verification automatically, sending only flagged submissions to a human reviewer. That should speed up how fast approvals come through.

In the dashboard, you'll find BotBase under Protect and Connect, then Application Security, then BotBase, split into three sections: the bot directory, the submission form, and submission history. There's also a My Bots filter so you can pull up just your own submissions. Bots that declare their info accurately and earn a Verified status will factor into how sites decide whether to allow them across the board. Cloudflare says it also plans to add ownership claims and a way for bots and site owners to communicate directly down the line.

Wrap-up

• Submission status (pending, approved, or rejected) is now visible right in the dashboard
• Submissions that aren't approved yet can be edited or canceled without starting over
• A new behavior model lets operators declare what a bot does, how it uses content, and who operates it
• Review is now mostly automated, with only flagged submissions going to a human

If you run a search crawler or an AI agent and want sites to recognize it correctly, this is a quiet but genuinely useful update for you.