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Cloudflare Browser Run

Cloudflare Browser Run is the signed agent identity for page loads made through Cloudflare Browser Rendering.
Cloudflare
AI AssistantAgentUser Initiated

What is Cloudflare Browser Run?

Cloudflare Browser Run is the signed agent identity for page loads made through Cloudflare Browser Rendering. The service gives Cloudflare customers headless browsers that can open and interact with websites. Common jobs include capturing a screenshot, producing a PDF, extracting page content, or letting an AI agent operate a browser.

There is no stable user-agent token or fixed user-agent pattern for this identity. That makes a token-only firewall rule unsuitable, particularly for programmable browser sessions. Cloudflare instead registers Browser Run with Web Bot Auth and publishes its signature directory at https://web-bot-auth.cloudflare-browser-rendering-085.workers.dev/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory.

Browser Rendering has more than one way to start those jobs. Its REST API offers stateless actions for outputs such as HTML, Markdown, screenshots, PDFs, and structured data. Workers bindings provide fuller browser control for custom automation and longer sessions through tools such as Puppeteer or Playwright.

Robots.txt behavior is unknown in this catalog, while Cloudflare's directory lists Browser Run as not following robots.txt. Since there is no stable token to address in the file anyway, site owners should make access decisions from the verified signature, requested route, authentication state, and workload cost. A valid signature identifies Cloudflare Browser Run; it does not require a site to serve the request.

The Cloudflare customer chooses the destination and the browser action. A request can run JavaScript and behave like a browser session, but Browser Run is not a public search crawler that independently discovers and indexes a domain. This identity also excludes Browser Rendering's /crawl endpoint, which Cloudflare registers under the separate Cloudflare Browser Rendering Crawler agent.

Browser Run has no direct effect on inclusion in a public AI search index. A customer may use its extracted content in an AI application or send an agent through an interactive workflow, yet the request alone says nothing about model training or later publication. Its immediate meaning is that a Cloudflare customer asked Browser Rendering to load the page.

Relevant for AI search

Is Cloudflare Browser Run relevant for AI search?

Yes. Cloudflare Browser Run collects pages for an AI product, so what it can crawl influences how AI systems describe your brand.

Cloudflare Browser Run crawls and indexes pages so the AI search or assistant behind it can retrieve them at answer time. A page it has never fetched cannot be quoted, summarized, or linked in that product's answers, so most sites keep it allowed to stay citable. Blocking it removes your pages from that AI surface and hands those citations to competitors.

How to handle Cloudflare Browser Run

Do not add a guessed robots.txt token for Browser Run. None is registered. Validate Web Bot Auth with https://web-bot-auth.cloudflare-browser-rendering-085.workers.dev/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory, then apply an explicit edge policy for the routes you are willing to render.

Public pages used for screenshots or content extraction may be safe to allow, while authenticated screens and expensive endpoints may need tighter limits. Keep rules for this identity separate from Cloudflare Browser Rendering Crawler, since /crawl traffic has its own bot record and may call for a different policy.

Examples

  • A Cloudflare customer calls the Browser Rendering PDF endpoint for a public report, causing Browser Run to load the report page.
  • An AI agent uses a Workers browser binding to inspect a JavaScript application, and the site permits only the test routes assigned to that workflow.
  • A security team verifies Browser Run's signature and keeps its rule separate from the identity used by Cloudflare's site-wide `/crawl` endpoint.

Frequently asked questions about Cloudflare Browser Run

Learn about AI visibility monitoring and how Promptwatch helps your brand succeed in AI search.

A Cloudflare customer starts a Browser Rendering action through the REST API, a Workers binding, or another supported browser interface. The customer selects the page and the work the browser performs.

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