---
title: WatchForBot is now a verified bot on Cloudflare
description: Some sites behind Cloudflare answered our probes with 403 Forbidden while real visitors had no trouble, so their monitors showed failures that weren't there…
canonical: https://watchfor.io/changelog/2026-10-20-cloudflare-verified-bot
---

[All updates](/changelog#2026-10-20-cloudflare-verified-bot) ⚡ Improved Oct 20, 2026 · v 11.8.1

# WatchForBot is now a verified bot on Cloudflare

Some sites behind Cloudflare answered our probes with 403 Forbidden while real visitors had no trouble, so their monitors showed failures that weren't there. WatchForBot is now listed as a verified bot in Cloudflare's bots directory, and Cloudflare checks our request signatures itself. Within minutes of the listing going live, those checks started passing again with nothing to change on your side.

## What changed

Every HTTP probe request has been signed with [Web Bot Auth](/bot) (RFC 9421 HTTP message signatures) for a while. Until Cloudflare listed us, a Cloudflare zone could see the signature but had nothing to check it against, and some zones answered with 403 Forbidden .

WatchForBot is now in [Cloudflare Radar's bots directory](https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/directory?q=watchfor) as a verified bot in the Monitoring & Operations category. Cloudflare verifies the signature on each request, and zones that allow verified bots let our probes through.

The effect was immediate: monitors of sites behind Cloudflare that had been answered with 403 went back to 200 within a few minutes of the listing, and their open incidents resolved on their own.

## If your site still blocks the checks

A zone can choose to block or challenge verified bots, or the monitoring category. If that is your own site, one WAF rule fixes it: [Allowlist us in two minutes](/docs/reference/probe-locations#using-cloudflare-allowlist-us-in-two-minutes). Other CDNs and WAFs (Akamai and others) don't use Cloudflare's list; allowlist the WatchForBot User-Agent or our [published IP ranges](/ip-ranges) there.

How to identify and verify WatchForBot yourself: [watchfor.io/bot](/bot).

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Canonical page: https://watchfor.io/changelog/2026-10-20-cloudflare-verified-bot · Site guide: https://watchfor.io/llms.txt