Overview
Cloudflare Always Online is a CDN service bot from Cloudflare used for AI crawler discovery, assistant retrieval, AI search support, or model-related web access.
Its primary user-agent pattern is CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline; related patterns include CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline/1.0; Cloudflare Always Online.
Cloudflare Always Online is Verified from current authoritative identity documentation reviewed on 2026-08-07. The identity type is Official Documented.
Robots.txt behavior is not currently confirmed.
Cloudflare Always Online should be reviewed against site policy, source evidence, crawl rate, and requested paths before a permanent allow or block rule is created.
Identity
- User-Agent
CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline- Aliases
- CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline/1.0; Cloudflare Always Online
- HTTP Agent Examples
CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline- Robots.txt Token
CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline- Identity Type
- Official Documented
- Evidence Method
- Match `CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline` to the current operator documentation and corroborate the request with operator-controlled verification signals where available; User-Agent strings alone can be spoofed.
Classification
- Type
- CDN Service
- Kind
- Crawler
- Family
- Cloudflare
- Purpose
- availability-caching
Behavior and handling
- Common Use
- Cloudflare Always Online is used for AI crawler discovery, assistant retrieval, AI search support, or model-related web access.
- Detection Notes
- Cloudflare Always Online traffic is primarily detected by the `CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline` user-agent pattern; related patterns include `CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline/1.0; Cloudflare Always Online`. Compare source IPs, reverse DNS, request paths, and crawl cadence with Cloudflare infrastructure before trusting the traffic.
- Respects robots.txt
- Unknown
- Spoofing Risk
- Cloudflare Always Online has medium spoofing risk because the user-agent can be copied, even when the bot has strong source or documentation support.
- Risk
- Neutral
- Recommended Handling
- Depends
Rules and controls
- Robots.txt Snippet
# robots.txt behavior is unconfirmed. Do not rely on this rule without verification.