Cloudflare teams up with tech giants to help retailers combat bots
American technology company Cloudflare has teamed up with Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft, and Shopify to help retailers combat a new wave of online traffic from internet bots.
The new system comes in response to the Internet’s shift from human-driven activity to agentic artificial intelligence, which often clicks onto websites at a much higher rate.
“The way we interact with the Internet is facing a fundamental shift,” said Dane Knecht, CTO of Cloudflare. “Normal, everyday tasks like ordering food previously required a user to personally navigate menus and payment gateways. Now, autonomous agents are starting to orchestrate these workflows on behalf of people.”
Cloudflare said that website operators have relied on “imperfect” techniques in the past to manage such traffic. Now, the abundance of AI has made it even harder. This growing trend poses an “unprecedented privacy problem”, Cloudflare added.
“In commerce, every extra challenge, delay, or false positive can turn a purchase into an abandoned cart,” Ilya Grigorik, engineer at Shopify, said. “Merchants need effective protections against automated abuse, but buyers shouldn’t have to pay for them with unnecessary friction or invasive tracking.”
The new system will issue tokens to acknowledge the “personhood” of the user. These should then reduce the need for extensive privacy controls, without accessing the user’s own information.
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