Cloudflare

If your site runs behind Cloudflare, connecting it shows what happened at the edge before a request ever reached your server: which crawlers came, which status codes they got, and which firewall rules stopped them. That is often where a search drop starts, when a bot rule begins to challenge Googlebot.

Create the token

RankDebug connects with an API token you create, limited to reading one zone.

1. In Cloudflare, open My Profile → API Tokens.
2. Click Create Token, then Create Custom Token.
3. Add two permissions: Zone → Zone → Read and Zone → Analytics → Read.
4. Under Zone Resources, include the zone of this website.
5. Create the token and copy it.

Connecting

1. On Connections, click Connect Cloudflare and paste the token. RankDebug checks it with Cloudflare before saving it.
2. Choose the zone for this website.

What is pulled

• Requests per hour by host, crawler and edge response status.
• The requests the edge blocked, per crawler.
• Per day, the paths that answered with redirects, client errors or server errors, per crawler.
• Per day, the firewall rules that fired, per crawler, with the action taken and the rule's description where the token can read it.

Requests are sorted into crawlers by user agent: Googlebot, Bingbot, GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot, other bots, and human visitors.

The first pull covers the last 7 days. After that it syncs every hour and pulls the last day again. Cloudflare keeps analytics for a limited time that depends on your Cloudflare plan, and a range past it is skipped rather than reported as a failure.

What it powers

The Overview shows crawler traffic, the paths that answered with errors and the firewall rules by crawler. The AI readiness check reads the firewall events to tell whether each AI crawler is blocked at the edge.