Learn how Cloudflare’s Bot Fight Mode slows and disables bad bots.

Overview

Cloudflare’s Bot Fight Mode detects bad bots and performs several actions: 

• Slows the bot with a computationally intensive challenge, and
• Notifies Bandwidth Alliance partners (if applicable) to disable the bot.

The underlying technology to detect bots is the same as Cloudflare Bot Management for Enterprise plans.  However, Bot Fight Mode differs in many ways: 

1. No additional customizations or options are provided via Cloudflare Firewall Rules.
2. Bot scores, metrics, and Firewall Events are not shown. 
3. Bot Fight Mode does not utilize captchas, blocks, or cookies. 

Bot Fight Mode is available for Cloudflare domains on Free, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans.  For granular control, we recommend customers instead use Bot Management.  

Enable Bot Fight Mode

Bot Fight Mode is turned On or Off via the Cloudflare Firewall app under the Settings tab.  Bot Fight Mode applies at the domain level and is not available via Page Rules.  Bot Fight Mode only challenges requests from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers, such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and DigitalOcean.

Related resources

• Bot Management
• Bot Fight Mode Blog