Cloudflare's taxonomy classifies automated traffic by behavior into three types — search (building an index that sends referral visitors back), agent (acting in real time on a person's behalf), and training (absorbing content into a model) — which appear identical in a raw request log yet carry very different business consequences.

Cloudflare sorts automated traffic by behavior rather than a single 'AI' label, separating search (referral-generating), agent (real-time assistant), and training (content absorption) despite them looking identical in raw logs. ✦ AI generated

Author · ByteByteGo Newsletter · 2026-08-11 · original ↗

Cloudflare's taxonomy groups automated traffic by behavior rather than by the single label 'AI'. Three behaviors impact the key policy decisions. Search covers behavior that builds an index of a site so an engine can answer questions about it later. ... An agent covers behavior that acts in real time on a person's behalf, usually with a human waiting for the result. ... Training covers behavior that takes content to train or fine-tune a model, where the content is absorbed into the model rather than pointing a visitor back. These three appear identical in a raw request log, yet they carry very different consequences for a site's business.

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