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The Cloudflare Blog – Brought to you by EmDash
Cloudflare migrated its official blog to EmDash, an Astro-focused content management system, acting as internal Customer Zero to evaluate scaling and usability. To prepare for traffic spikes reaching thousands of requests per second, engineers used k6 to execute ramp, breakpoint, and burst load tests. The resulting production architecture runs EmDash on Cloudflare Workers, pairing it with Workers Cache, an object cache backed by Workers KV, and Hyperdrive connected to PlanetScale. This layered caching design serves 99.5 percent of static files and 70 percent of requests from cache, flattening p95 latency under real-world loads reaching 850 requests per second. The migration also introduced a frontend redesign using the Kumo design system and added Model Context Protocol servers for automated agent workflows.
Kody JacksonSay it once: introducing Bot Preference Sync
Cloudflare announced Bot Preference Sync, a feature across all customer tiers that automatically reflects dashboard AI bot configurations directly in a site's robots.txt file. Website operators previously faced challenges synchronizing static robots.txt directives with edge enforcement rules, which led some crawlers to ignore stated preferences or attempt bypasses. Under this system, Cloudflare generates and prepends directives for Search, Agent, and Training categories to existing robots.txt files using crawler lists tracked in BotBase. Mixed-use crawlers performing both search indexing and training must meet strict transparency criteria, including honoring opt-outs and providing page-level visibility, to avoid edge blocks when training is disallowed. Additionally, onboarding workflows allow ad-supported publishers to automatically set AI model training to Disallow by default while retaining search visibility.
Jin-Hee LeeFrom all-or-nothing to task-based OAuth consent
Cloudflare introduced OAuth scope customization to replace all-or-nothing consent flows for third-party applications. Previously, users had to approve every requested scope or deny access completely, compelling developers of tools like MCP servers to construct custom pre-consent selection interfaces. With the new feature, developers can designate specific permissions as optional alongside required scopes when configuring an OAuth client. During authorization, users can deselect these optional scopes, while unrequested client scopes remain hidden to maintain task-specific consent screens. Because resulting access tokens contain only the granted subset of permissions, client applications must inspect returned scopes after code exchange rather than assuming full authorization.
Miller VargasA revisit of remote Spectre attacks on Cloudflare Workers
Cloudflare reassessed remote Spectre attack feasibility within Cloudflare Workers production workloads to evaluate defenses against modern stabilization techniques. The experimental proof of concept bypassed Dynamic Process Isolation (DyPrIs) by keeping invocations alive using WebSocket traffic, which also diluted hardware performance counter ratios below detection thresholds. By combining branch mistraining, cache line eviction, and speculative type confusion, researchers transiently accessed out-of-bounds memory via raw 64-bit TypedArray backing store pointers. This attack demonstrated cross-tenant data leakage reaching up to 12 bit/s with over 99% accuracy in production. In response, Cloudflare mitigated the vulnerability by integrating the V8 memory sandbox, deploying Memory Protection Keys for hardware-assisted in-process isolation, and redesigning DyPrIs to monitor active long-lived executions.
Martin SchwarzlBGP Role model: tracking the adoption of RFC 9234
Border Gateway Protocol route leaks occur when routing announcements propagate beyond their intended customer-provider or peer relationships, causing traffic misdirection and performance degradation. RFC 9234 embeds relationship awareness directly into BGP by establishing negotiated BGP Roles and attaching an Only to Customer (OTC) transitive path attribute to prevent unauthorized route propagation. To assess real-world adoption, Cloudflare monitored OTC attribute transmission across peer networks and discovered that 33.1 percent of IPv4 and 17 percent of IPv6 paths were missing the OTC attribute. Investigation revealed that Tier-1 transit providers AS1299 and AS3257 were stripping the attribute due to legacy defensive BGP error-handling configurations. Following direct engagement, AS1299 updated its configurations to preserve OTC propagation, whereas AS3257 continued stripping it, highlighting the necessity of broader vendor and carrier support across the Internet.
Bryton HerdesHow Cloudflare detects MCP traffic and helps secure it
Traditional security boundaries assume human speed and judgment, but AI agents execute nondeterministic actions rapidly and can invoke unapproved Model Context Protocol servers through standard HTTPS traffic. To mitigate this shadow traffic, Cloudflare One introduces detection and inspection capabilities across clients, network boundaries, and MCP servers. Cloudflare Gateway leverages protocol-level headers and JSON-RPC inspection to identify direct MCP connections, verify managed paths, and enforce access through approved MCP Server Portals. Furthermore, Cloudflare Agents SDK v0.20.0 implements the stateless 2026-07-28 MCP specification while providing fallback handshakes for legacy servers. Organizations can combine Gateway traffic source rules with server middleware like WriteGuard to block unauthorized tool invocations before execution.
AJ GerstenhaberSecure all your internal vibe-coded applications — in one click
AI-assisted development enables employees to build applications rapidly, but unmanaged deployments can accidentally expose internal company data to the public Internet. Cloudflare introduced direct Cloudflare Access integration for Cloudflare Workers, allowing organizations to enforce authentication policies directly at the account or individual Worker level rather than per hostname. When enabled, incoming requests are authenticated before reaching application code across custom domains, routes, workers.dev subdomains, and preview environments. Developers can access authenticated identity data such as emails and groups directly via the Worker context object without manually validating JSON Web Tokens. This capability was implemented on Cloudflare's Rust-based FL2 proxy, which separated Worker routing from Worker execution so routing runs safely prior to Access policy enforcement.
Chythra MalapatiTotal eclipse of the Internet: traffic impacts in Iceland, Spain, and Portugal
On August 12, a total solar eclipse crossed the North Atlantic and Europe, passing directly over Iceland, northern Spain, and Portugal. Cloudflare Radar analyzed HTTP request volumes in five-minute intervals across affected countries, comparing the data against a baseline derived from the previous three Wednesdays. Traffic reductions aligned closely with peak solar obscuration, with totality regions recording drops between 15% and 30% and specific areas shifting by up to -46.7%. Once the sun reappeared, request volumes rebounded to normal levels within minutes as users resumed device activity. The observed traffic declines were driven by aggregate human behavior rather than network failures.
Sabina ZejnilovicCertificate Transparency Monitoring is now generally available
Cloudflare announced the general availability of Certificate Transparency Monitoring alongside a filtering mechanism to eliminate noisy alert emails. Previously, the monitoring system alerted domain owners for all Certificate Transparency log entries, including routine, automated renewals for Universal SSL, Advanced Certificate Manager, and backup certificates. Because the alerting flow and certificate ordering service operated independently, existing identifiers like TBSCertificate hashes arrived too late to verify pre-certificates. To resolve this race condition, the ordering service now computes an SHA-256 hash of the DER-encoded SubjectPublicKeyInfo structure at key generation. When the alerting service discovers a log entry, it recomputes this hash to verify ownership against the ordering database, suppressing alerts for Cloudflare-managed certificates while preserving alerts for external or unexpected issuances.
Jenny YangCloudflare DDoS Threat Report H1 2026: 1 Tbps attacks soar as DNS floods and geopolitical tensions drive a new wave
In the first half of 2026, network-layer DDoS attacks exceeding 1 Tbps surged by 519% quarter-over-quarter, with 935 mitigated attacks recorded across the period. Threat actors shifted their focus toward reflection and amplification methods, making DNS-based floods and CLDAP floods the dominant vectors. Despite the rise in hyper-volumetric traffic, 96.62% of network-layer attacks remained under 500 Mbps and 90.60% ended in under 10 minutes. Geopolitical conflicts and international events heavily influenced target selection, pushing the Media, Production & Publishing industry to the top position. Because brief multi-gigabit bursts trigger downstream routing instability and application timeouts before analysts can respond, automated, always-on edge mitigation has become critical.
Cloudforce OneEverything we launched during Agents Week
Agents Week introduced a series of products and primitives across Cloudflare to support an Agentic Internet where autonomous software and humans interact. Developing capable agents requires addressing technical challenges spanning identity, communication, orchestration, memory, observability, and security. Cloudflare introduced the Agent Development Lifecycle alongside tools like Cloudflare Agents for live tracing, replay, and human-in-the-loop approvals. The releases also included programmable CI/CD pipelines capable of repairing failures, Cloudflare Wallets for agent transactions, and Kitesurf, an agent-first browser running in V8 isolates. New protocols and tools like WebMCP, MCPv2, and Cloudflare AI Search aim to make web data and applications readable, discoverable, and searchable by autonomous software.
Shelley JonesUnveiling good and bad behaviors on the Agentic Internet
Web traffic increasingly shifts between human interaction and automated agents, rendering point-in-time security checks ineffective against sophisticated automation. Cloudflare addresses this shift through continuous behavioral analysis designed to evaluate trust across entire user sessions rather than relying on static point-in-time hurdles. Its CDN-injected client-side system, Precursor, tracks continuous behavioral indicators like cursor movements to catch mid-session automated takeovers. To counter rapid bot adaptation, Cloudflare is introducing self-adjusting machine learning models under Adaptive Intelligence and non-deterministic defenses such as the AI Labyrinth. These tools allow site owners to poison scraper training data, trap crawlers in synthetic webs, or queue legitimate agents while dynamically penalizing abusive traffic.
Jin-Hee LeeIntroducing Radar Researcher: An AI tool for exploring Internet data in plain language
Cloudflare launched the beta of Radar Researcher, an AI tool designed to let users explore global Internet traffic data using plain-language queries. Built entirely on Cloudflare's developer platform, the system uses the Cloudflare Agents SDK within a Cloudflare Worker, maintaining conversation state and SQLite databases inside Durable Objects. The inference layer relies on Workers AI running models like Kimi K2.7 through an ordered fallback chain across three model families to prevent outages, routed via AI Gateway for logging, caching, and guardrails. Radar's frontend renders retrieved data using its existing native interactive charts, while smaller dedicated models generate conversation titles and follow-up suggestions asynchronously. Additionally, Radar introduced support for the WebMCP standard, exposing imperative and declarative tools to allow external browser agents to navigate and interact with the platform directly.
Lai Yi OhlsenAnnouncing Cloudflare Ambassadors, Community Engineers, and another $1M in open-source funding
Cloudflare introduced an updated community initiative featuring two tracks: Cloudflare Ambassadors and Cloudflare Community Engineers. The Ambassador program selects community leaders for terms lasting up to two years to organize events, lead student groups, and create learning spaces with company-provided credits, resources, and marketing assets. The Community Engineer track offers grants from a new one million dollar open-source fund spanning the next two years to support maintainers of projects such as Astro, Agents SDK, EmDash, Hono, and Vinext. To maintain its Discord server of nearly 100,000 members, a new Discord committee composed of staff and Ambassadors will guide community discussions while automated spam protections handle routine moderation.
Kristian FreemanUnifying Workers AI and AI Gateway into a single AI control plane
Workers AI and AI Gateway are converging into a unified AI control plane to simplify model access, billing, and observability. Developers can now access both services through a single entrypoint using unified Workers bindings and the /ai/ REST endpoint. Specifying a default gateway automatically instruments requests with payload logging, token tracking, and cost attribution without manual dashboard setup. Cloudflare has also rolled out unified prepaid billing, allowing teams to spend AI Gateway credits on Workers AI models while unlocking higher rate limits. Planned future features include model-first routing for automated provider failover and smart routing powered by task classifiers on Workers AI.
Michelle ChenCloudflare AI Search: give your agents a search engine for your data
Cloudflare introduced developer experience improvements and a preview pricing model for Cloudflare AI Search. Previously, users had to manually connect separate Cloudflare primitives like Workers AI, AI Gateway, Vectorize, R2, and Browser Run to build a search solution. The platform now automates crawling, ingestion, embedding, and retrieval across structured and unstructured data sources. Developers can index sites without sitemaps using link discovery, expose public /search and /mcp endpoints across namespaces, bind search instances directly to Workers, or secure endpoints with Cloudflare Access. Cloudflare uses this system for developer documentation, its corporate blog, and the Cloudflare Dev Stack MCP server to supply coding agents with cited documentation.
Nelson DuarteThe next generation of MCP
Model Context Protocol previously required stateful connections between clients and remote servers, creating operational complexity around sticky sessions, message replay, and open streams. The newly released MCP 2026-07-28 specification transitions MCP to a fully stateless protocol alongside updated SDKs across TypeScript, Python, Go, and C#. The protocol eliminates mandatory handshakes and session identifiers from core request paths while enabling servers to run on request-scoped infrastructure like Cloudflare Workers. Interactive elicitation is restructured through Multi Round-Trip Requests, which allow servers to return input requirements without sustaining persistent connections. Standardized headers for method names and improved OAuth authorization mechanisms further enable standard web infrastructure to inspect and manage MCP traffic efficiently.
Matt CareyFrom ranking to recommended: get your site ready to thrive in the age of AI agents
Discoverability is shifting from traditional search engine rankings to recommendations generated by AI agents acting on behalf of users. To address this shift, Cloudflare integrated Agent Readiness diagnostics and an Answer Engine Optimization tool into its dashboard. The Diagnostics feature evaluates hostnames against machine-readable standards across tiers ranging from robots.txt and Markdown rendering to OAuth discovery and agent payment protocols. Simultaneously, the Answer Engine Optimization tool measures how frequently leading assistants like Claude and GPT cite, mention, and prominently position brands across industry categories. By evaluating prompt responses using Cloudflare AI Gateway and Workers AI alongside access logs, site owners can systematically track agent traffic, benchmark against competitors, and remediate crawl blockers.
Matthew ConroyBuilding an open Agentic Internet: readable, discoverable, callable, and payable
The modern web produces billions of bot requests that repeatedly fetch unchanged pages, highlighting an architecture fundamentally misaligned with automated visitors acting on behalf of paying users. Cloudflare outlines an open Agentic Internet structured around four foundational capabilities: readability, discoverability, callability, and payability. Identity and access rely on open specifications such as Web Bot Auth and Private Access Control Tokens, while Markdown for Agents and the Kitesurf browser reduce token overhead and context window bloat. For execution and monetization, WebMCP exposes structured tools directly through the browser, and protocols like x402 paired with Monetization Gateway enable per-fetch transactions. These open standards allow domain owners to define tool contracts, verify bot identities, and monetize agent traffic without relying on legacy advertising models.
Jack Galilee