CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline

monitoring CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline

CloudFlare always online web crawler

About this crawler

CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline is a web crawler identified by the regular-expression pattern CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline in the User-Agent request header. It is categorised as monitoring. Use the regex above to detect, log, allow, or block CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline traffic in your web server, CDN edge rules, or robots.txt.

Block-rate · top 25k sites

0.20%
latest snapshot
2026-06-04
matched key: CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline
2026-05-062026-06-040.26%

Technical details

Name
CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline
Pattern
CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline
Tags
monitoring
Reference
https://www.cloudflare.com/always-online/
Added
2018/09/27
rDNS suffixes
.cloudflare.com
Instances
2 known sample(s)

rDNS verification (FCrDNS)

Verify a request is genuinely CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline with forward-confirmed reverse DNS: the client IP's PTR record must end in one of the suffixes below and a forward A/AAAA lookup of that hostname must return the same IP. UA strings alone are spoofable; FCrDNS is not.

Sample User-Agent strings

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline/1.0; +http://www.cloudflare.com/always-online) AppleWebKit/534.34
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline/1.0; +https://www.cloudflare.com/always-online) AppleWebKit/534.34

Block this crawler

robots.txt — disallow CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline:

User-agent: CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline Disallow: /

Apache .htaccess — return 403:

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline [NC] RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Nginx — return 403 inside a server block:

if ($http_user_agent ~* "CloudFlare-AlwaysOnline") { return 403; }
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