Comment by luckylion
13 days ago
Not that I've seen it.
If you enable Cloudflare Captcha, you'll see basically no more bots, only the most persistent remain (that have an active interest in you/your content and aren't just drive-by-hits).
It's just that having the brief interception hurts your conversion rate. Might depend on industry, but we saw 20-30% drops in page views and conversions which just makes it a nuclear option when you're under attack, but not something to use just to block annoyances.
we saw 20-30% drops in page views and conversions
Why do you attribute this to only the "brief interception"? Shouldn't the logical conclusion be that Cloudflare may block 20-30% of regular traffic?
There was no hard block, just everyone getting the brief JS-captcha-thing.
The reason I'm fairly confident that it wasn't bots that were blocked is that we run quite a bit of bot-filtering in our analysis (and only track via delayed JS, which already gets rid of of 80-90% of bots; we don't care about bots viewing our pages, but we don't want them to mess up our stats) and all other metrics (conversion-rate, device + browser-distribution, country-mix) still lined up, they were just significantly lower than what expectations + search analytics said they should be.