Discussion

Changelog

triwats: this could be cool to use cloudflare's edge to do some monitoring of endpoints actual content for synthetic monitoring

8cvor6j844qw_d6: Does this bypass their own anti-AI crawl measures?I'll need to test it out, especially with the labyrinth.

xhcuvuvyc: Yeah, that'd be huge, like 90% of my search engine results are just cloudflare bot checks if I don't filter it out.

ljm: Is cloudflare becoming a mob outfit? Because they are selling scraping countermeasures but are now selling scraping too.And they can pull it off because of their reach over the internet with the free DNS.

jasongill: I'm surprised that Cloudflare hasn't started hosting a pre-scraped version of websites that use Cloudflare's proxy - something like https://www.example.com/cdn-cgi/cached-contents.json They already have the website content in their cache, so why not just cut out the middle man of scraping services and API's like this and publish it?Obviously there's good reasons NOT to, but I am surprised they haven't started offering it (as an "on-by-default" option, naturally) yet.

cmsparks: That would prolly work for simple sites, but you still need the dedicated scraping service with a browser to render sites that are more complex (i.e. SPAs)

Imustaskforhelp: This might be really great!I had the idea after buying https://mirror.forum recently (which I talked in discord and archiveteam irc servers) that I wanted to preserve/mirror forums (especially tech) related [Think TinyCoreLinux] since Archive.org is really really great but I would prefer some other efforts as well within this space.I didn't want to scrape/crawl it myself because I felt like it would feel like yet another scraping effort for AI and strain resources of developers.And even when you want to crawl, the issue is that you can't crawl cloudflare and sometimes for good measure.So in my understanding, can I use Cloudflare Crawl to essentially crawl the whole website of a forum and does this only work for forums which use cloudflare ?Also what is the pricing of this? Is it just a standard cloudflare worker so would I get free 100k requests and 1 Million per the few cents (IIRC) offer for crawling. Considering that Cloudflare is very scalable, It might even make sense more than buying a group of cheap VPS'sAlso another point but I was previously thinking that the best way was probably if maintainers of these forums could give me a backup archive of the forum in a periodic manner as my heart believes it to be most cleanest way and discussing it on Linux discord servers and archivers within that community and in general, I couldn't find anyone who maintains such tech forums who can subscribe to the idea of sharing the forum's public data as a quick backup for preservation purposes. So if anyone knows or maintains any forums myself. Feel free to message here in this thread about that too.

mdasen: If this does bypass their own (and others') anti-AI crawl measures, it'd basically mean that the only people who can't crawl are those without money.We're creating an internet that is becoming self-reinforcing for those who already have power and harder for anyone else. As crawling becomes difficult and expensive, only those with previously collected datasets get to play. I certainly understand individual sites wanting to limit access, but it seems unlikely that they're limiting access to the big players - and maybe even helping them since others won't be able to compete as well.

Retr0id: For a long time cloudflare has proudly protected DDoS-as-a-service sites (but of course, they claim they don't "host" them)

rrr_oh_man: It’s a three letter agency front.

pupppet: Cloudflare getting all the cool toys. AWS, anyone awake over there?

theamk: [delayed]

jsheard: They say it doesn't: https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/faq/#wil...Browser Rendering requests are also branded with obvious CF-specific headers which should make them easy for others to filter if they're so inclined.

michaelmior: > I'm surprised that Cloudflare hasn't started hosting a pre-scraped version of websites that use Cloudflare's proxyIt's entirely possible that they're doing this under the hood for cases where they can clearly identify the content they have cached is public.

everfrustrated: Will this crawler be run behind or infront of their bot blocker logic?

csomar: It’s a bit more complicated than that. This is their product Browser Rendering, which runs a real browser that loads the page and executes JavaScript. It’s a bit more involved than a simple curl scraping.

babelfish: Didn't they just throw a (very public) fit over Perplexity doing the exact same thing?

its-kostya: Cloudflare has been trying to mediate publishers & AI companies. If publishers are behind Cloudflare and Cloudflare's bot detection stops scrapers at the request of publishers, the publishers can allow their data to be scraped (via this end point) for a price. It creates market scarcity. I don't believe the target audience is you and me. Unless you own a very popular blog that AI companies would pay you for.

rvz: Selling the cure (DDoS protection) and creating the poison (Authorized AI crawling) against their customers.

adi_kurian: Common Crawl has free egress

stri8ted: Do you have any evidence to support this view?

mtmail: Any kind of source for the claim?

ipaddr: "I didn't want to scrape/crawl it myself because I felt like it would feel like yet another scraping effort for AI and strain resources of developers"You feel better paying someone to do the same thimg?

jppope: This is actually really amazing. Cloudflare is just skating to where the puck is going to be on this one.

devnotes77: To clarify the two questions raised:First, the Cloudflare Crawl endpoint does not require the target site to use Cloudflare. It spins up a headless Chrome instance (via the Browser Rendering API) that fetches and renders any publicly accessible URL. You could crawl a site hosted on Hetzner or a bare VPS with the same call.Second on pricing: Browser Rendering is only available on the Workers Paid plan ($5/month). It is not part of the free tier. Usage is billed per invocation beyond the included quota - the exact limits are in the Cloudflare docs under Browser Rendering pricing, but for archival use cases with moderate crawl rates you are very unlikely to run into meaningful costs.The practical gotcha for forum archival is pagination and authentication-gated content. If the forum requires a login to see older posts, a headless browser session with saved cookies would help, but that is more complex to orchestrate than a single-shot fetch.

devnotes77: Worth noting: origin owners can still detect and block CF Browser Rendering requests if needed.Workers-originated requests include a CF-Worker header identifying the workers subdomain, which distinguishes them from regular CDN proxying. You can match on this in a WAF rule or origin middleware.The trickier issue: rendered requests originate from Cloudflare ASN 13335 with a low bot score, so if you rely on CF bot scores for content protection, requests through their own crawl product will bypass that check. The practical defense is application-layer rate limiting and behavioral analysis rather than network-level scores -- which is better practice regardless.The structural conflict is real but similar to search engines offering webmaster tools while running the index. The incentives are misaligned, but the individual products have independent utility. The harder question is whether the combination makes it meaningfully harder to build effective bot protection on top of their platform.

binarymax: Based on the post, it seems likely that they'd just delay per the robots.txt policy no matter what, and do a full browser render of the cached page to get the content. Probably overkill for lots and lots of sites. An HTML fetch + readability is really cheap.

binarymax: Really hard to understand costs here. What is a reasonable pages per second? Should I assume with politeness that I'm basically at 1 page per second == 3600 pages/hour? Seems painfully slow.

greatgib: All what was expected, first they do a huge campaign to out evil scrapers. We should use their service to ensure your website block llm and bots to come scraping them. Look how bad it is.And once that is setup, and you have you walled garden, then you can present your own api to scrape website. All well done to be used by your llm. But as you know, we are the gate keeper so that the Mafia boss decide what will be the "intermediate" that is proper for itself to let you do what you were doing without intermediary before.

Imustaskforhelp: I actually don't but it seems that cloudflare caches responses so if anything instead of straining the developer resources, it would strain more cloudflare resources and cloudflare could better handle that more efficiently with their own crawl product.Also, I am genuinely open to feedback (Like a lot) so just let me know if you know of any other alternative too for the particular thing that I wish to create and I would love to have a discussion about that too! I genuinely wish that there can be other ways and part of the reason why I wrote that comment was wishing that someone who manages forums or knows people who do can comment back and we can have a discussion/something-meaningful!I am also happy with you also suggesting me any good use cases of the domain in general if there can be made anything useful with it. In fact, I am happy with transferring this domain to you if this is something which is useful to ya or anyone here (Just donate some money preferably 50-100$ to any great charity in date after this comment is made and mail me details and I am absolutely willing to transfer the domain, or if you work in any charity currently and if it could help the charity in any meaningful manner!)I had actually asked archive team if I could donate the domain to them if it would help archive.org in any meaningful way and they essentially politely declined.I just bought this domain because someone on HN said mirror.org when they wanted to show someone else mirror and saw the price of the .org domain being so high (150k$ or similar)and I have habit of finding random nice TLD and I found mirror.forum so I bought itAnd I was just thinking of hmm what can be a decent idea now that I have bought it and had thought of that. Obviously I have my flaws (many actually) but I genuinely don't wish any harm to anybody especially those people who are passionate about running independent forums in this centralized-web. I'd rather have this domain be expired if its activation meant harm to anybody.looking forward to discussion with ya.

radium3d: Instead of "should have been an email" this is "should have been a prompt" and can be run locally instead. There are a number of ways to do this from a linux terminal.``` write a custom crawler that will crawl every page on a site (internal links to the original domain only, scroll down to mimic a human, and save the output as a WebP screenshot, HTML, Markdown, and structured JSON. Make it designed to run locally in a terminal on a linux machine using headless Google Chrome and take advantage of multiple cores to run multiple pages simultaneously while keeping in mind that it might have to throttle if the server gets hit too fast from the same IP. ```Might use available open source software such as python, playwright, beautifulsoup4, pillow, aiofiles, trafilatura

selcuka: Not the same thing, but they have something close (it's not on-by-default, yet) [1]:> Cloudflare's network now supports real-time content conversion at the source, for enabled zones using content negotiation headers. Now when AI systems request pages from any website that uses Cloudflare and has Markdown for Agents enabled, they can express the preference for text/markdown in the request. Our network will automatically and efficiently convert the HTML to markdown, when possible, on the fly.[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/markdown-for-agents/

shadowfiend: No: https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/rest-api...

shadowfiend: In front: https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/rest-api...

patchnull: The main win here is abstracting away browser context lifecycle management. Anyone who has run Puppeteer on Workers knows the pain of handling cold starts, context reuse, and timeout cascading across navigation steps. Having crawl() bundle render-then-extract into one call covers maybe 80% of scraping use cases. The remaining 20% where you need request interception or pre-render script injection still needs the full Browser Rendering API, but for pulling structured data from public pages this is a big simplification over managing session state yourself.

shadowfiend: No: https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-rendering/rest-api...

subscribed: I think there's some space being absolutely snuffed by the countless bots of everyone, ignoring everything, pulling from residential proxies, and this, supposedly slower, well behavior, smarter bot.Like there's a difference between dozens of drunk teenagers thrashing the city streets in the illegal street race vs a taxi driver.

Normal_gaussian: This presumably is going to be cheap and effective. Its much easier to wrap a prompt round this and know it works that mess around with crawling it all yourself.You'll still be hand-rolling it if you want to disrespect crawling requirements though.

rolymath: Read who and how it was founded. It's not a secret at all.

skybrian: If two customers crawl the same website and it uses crawl-delay, how does it handle that? Are they independent, or does each one run half as fast?

Normal_gaussian: "Well-behaved bot - Honors robots.txt directives, including crawl-delay"From the behaviour of our peers, this seems to be the real headline news.

david_iqlabs: Crawling pages is actually the easy part. The harder problem is turning the crawl data into something useful. I’ve found the real work is extracting clear signals from the mess of HTML and responses.

arjie: Oh man, I was hoping I could offer a nicely-crawled version of my site. It would be cool if they offered that for site admins. Then everyone who wanted to crawl would just get a thing they could get for pure transfer cost. I suppose I could build one by submitting a crawl job against myself and then offering a `static.` subdomain on each thing that people could access. Then it's pure HTML instant-load.

x0x0: most websites, particularly those behind cloudflare, are very restrictive even to crawlers that obey robots. Proof: a ton of my time over the last year, and my crawlers very carefully obey robots.It's hard to see how this isn't extorting folks by offering a working solution that, oh, cloudflare doesn't block. As long as you pay Cloudflare.Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but I'd be quite surprised if cloudflare subjected their own headless browsing to the same rules the rest of the internet gets.