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Introducing Radar Researcher: An AI tool for exploring Internet data in plain language
CloudflareLai Yi Ohlsen
Summary
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.
Context
Navigating Cloudflare Radar's complex Internet datasets and API documentation posed a barrier for non-experts and time-constrained users, such as journalists tracking outages, who require quick insights and visualizations without mastering specialized vocabulary or manual queries.
Approach / What changed
Cloudflare built Radar Researcher using the Cloudflare Agents SDK on Workers, stateful Durable Objects with SQLite, and Workers AI with fallback chains routed through AI Gateway. The tool accepts voice or text prompts, integrates with an Explain with AI feature that sends chart screenshots alongside API data, and supports WebMCP to expose UI capabilities to browser agents.
Takeaways
- Radar Researcher combines chart screenshots, raw API data, and active filter parameters so the underlying vision model precisely explains exact visualizations rather than generic representations.
- The agent architecture persists chat sessions and streaming generation across disconnections by hosting each conversation in a Durable Object backed by its own SQLite database.
- Support for the WebMCP standard allows external browser agents to discover and execute Radar capabilities through imperative JavaScript APIs and declarative HTML form annotations.
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