Directory/Categories/Verified Bot/Cloudflare Purge

Cloudflare Purge

Name: Cloudflare Purge
Author: Cloudflare

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An internal Cloudflare service that invalidates and refreshes cached content across the edge network to ensure users receive the most current version of a website's assets. Operated by Cloudflare.

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Assessment

Verified Bot

What is Cloudflare Purge?

Cloudflare Purge is a specialized internal service operated by Cloudflare designed to maintain the integrity of cached resources across their global edge network. When a website owner updates content or triggers a cache purge, this bot interacts with the origin server to ensure that stale assets are removed and replaced with the latest versions. It acts as a critical synchronization mechanism, preventing users from viewing outdated or broken content that might otherwise persist in distributed edge caches.

Helpful — This bot performs essential cache management tasks that ensure website performance and content accuracy for end-users.

Identification

Bot name

Cloudflare Purge

Operator

Cloudflare

Why it crawls your site

The bot crawls specific resources to verify and update the cache state of a website's assets on Cloudflare's infrastructure. By accessing the origin server, it confirms that the cached version matches the current live version, allowing Cloudflare to serve updated content efficiently without requiring a full site re-crawl. Operators can verify this bot by checking for the 'Cloudflare-Purge' user-agent and confirming that the request originates from Cloudflare's known IP ranges, as it is a verified internal service.

Block or allow Cloudflare Purge

Block it

Add a Disallow rule for Cloudflare-Purge/ in your robots.txt file. You can also block at the server level using your web server configuration or CDN firewall rules to filter requests matching the user-agent string.

# Block Cloudflare Purge from crawling your entire site
User-agent: Cloudflare-Purge/
Disallow: /

# Allow Cloudflare Purge full access
User-agent: Cloudflare-Purge/
Allow: /

Allow & verify

Ensure your robots.txt allows Cloudflare-Purge/. Verify requests are genuine by checking the user-agent string and referring to Cloudflare's documentation.