BotBase for Operators adds submission tracking and bot directory
For a while now, BotBase has been Cloudflare’s way of helping site owners sort legitimate automated traffic from the noise. They added a searchable bot directory through the dashboard and Business Insights to dig into crawler behavior, but the submission flow for operators was always a dead end. You filled out the form under Manage Account → Configurations, submitted, and then waited with zero feedback.
That changes today. The bot submission experience now lives under Protect & Connect → Application Security → BotBase, right alongside the rest of the bot and trust tools. It’s broken into three clear sections:
- Bots directory — search and filter the same catalog Cloudflare Radar tracks.
- Submission form — submit a new bot.
- Submission history — track everything you’ve submitted.
The real win here is the Submission history tab. Operators used to have to email support just to check status, and even then, responses were slow and vague. Now you can see every submission tied to your account with one of three statuses:
- Waiting for review — received and queued.
- Accepted — reviewed and added to the directory.
- Rejected — needs changes, with reasons and steps to fix.
Open any entry to see full details, including rejection reasons or classification tweaks Cloudflare made during review. There’s also a “My bots” filter in the directory view so you can see only the bots submitted under your current account.
One thing worth flagging: this only tracks submissions from the launch date forward. Anything submitted before today isn’t retroactively visible here, so if you’ve got legacy bots in the system, you’ll still need support tickets to dig those up.
A couple of notes from hands-on testing:
- The new location makes sense — it’s adjacent to WAF rules and other security tools, which is where operators actually spend their time.
- Status updates aren’t instant. Submissions showed “Waiting for review” for a few hours before flipping to “Accepted” or “Rejected” during my test runs.
- Rejection messages are actually helpful. One of mine got bounced because the bot’s user agent string didn’t match the documentation I provided — clear error, actionable fix.
This is the kind of transparency move that seems obvious in hindsight. If you’re managing bots on Cloudflare, it’s worth poking around the new section. The submission form URL is
dash.cloudflare.com/?to=/:account/bot-management/bots/submission if you want to jump straight in.