Glossary · Getting in: access
CDN
Content delivery network: the service that sits in front of your site and delivers it quickly around the world. It's often where bot rules live, and where agent traffic is recorded. See setting up your CDN for AI agents.
Why it matters
Your CDN is where many agent decisions are made and recorded: it often holds the bot rules, and its logs are the most complete record of which agents visit. That makes it the place to fix blocking problems, and the place to measure agent traffic your analytics can't see. Ask whoever runs it which bot settings are switched on.
Read the guide Setting up your CDN for AI agents How to set up your CDN and WAF for AI agents: verified bot categories, signed requests, rule order, challenge versus block, and logging. Read itMore terms in getting in
- robots.txt A file at the root of your site that tells crawlers and agents which pages they may visit.
- Bot protection Services such as Cloudflare, Akamai or DataDome that block or challenge automated visitors.
- CAPTCHA or challenge A test that tries to tell people from bots, such as picking out images or waiting on a “checking your browser” page.
- Rate limit A cap on how many requests a visitor can make in a given time.
- Verification Checking that a visitor claiming to be a known agent really is, using the proof its operator publishes: IP ranges, reverse DNS or a signature.
- Impostor (spoofed agent) A request that uses a trusted agent's name but fails verification.
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