Cloudflare continues its onslaught against bots with an automated defense offering it claims can react to attacks “instantly.”
Dubbed Adaptive Intelligence, the continuous detection engine is built directly into Cloudflare’s Bot Management security product. The vendor boldly claims it analyzes “more than a trillion web visits every day” to spot automated attacks as they unfold.
“Building taller walls fails when the cost of scaling an attack is effectively zero,” Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht said. “To stop modern bot threats, you have to flip the economics on the attackers. Traditional defenses offer a static target that threat actors can systematically solve. Cloudflare’s Adaptive Intelligence creates a moving target – rendering an attacker’s engineering efforts obsolete before their operation can ever achieve scale.”
AI bot traffic is on the rise, and so to are automated attacks. Cloudflare’s own yearly review showed bot traffic accounted for 4.2% of HTML requests in 2025, while the vendor said in July automated bot traffic generates roughly 57% of all web requests today.
But that same means for indexing and AI training is also being employed by threat actors to employ increasingly sophisticated attacks. Reports from both Google and Nokia show that AI-induced circumventions are being employed, while Russian and Chinese actor making use of the technology for espionage campaigns.
Cloudflare’s latest innovation to battle the bots uses a machine learning model that “retrains continuously” on live traffic to uncover bypass techniques. It also generates hyper-targeted rules for blocking specific threats that prevent attackers from mapping defenses.
“Adaptive Intelligence acts like a single, constantly learning brain,” a Cloudflare press release claimed, adding that customers can use the product to analyze multi-timeframe behavior patterns simultaneously to catch low-and-slow threats, like slow credential stuffing and scraping campaigns.
The launch is the latest in a growing number of security-centric products from Cloudflare.
In July, it unveiled Precursor, which analyzes interactions across an entire user session on the client side in a bid to beat bots attempting to beat CAPTCHA tests. A month prior, Cloudflare debuted a new privacy standard co-developed with browser giants aimed at reducing bot fraud using anonymous cryptographic tokens.