
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/">
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        <title><![CDATA[ The Cloudflare Blog ]]></title>
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        <lastBuildDate>Fri, 01 May 2026 02:46:59 GMT</lastBuildDate>
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            <title><![CDATA[Introducing the Agent Readiness score. Is your site agent-ready?]]></title>
            <link>https://blog.cloudflare.com/agent-readiness/</link>
            <pubDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:05:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[ The Agent Readiness score can help site owners understand how well their websites support AI agents. Here we explore new standards, share Radar data, and detail how we made Cloudflare’s docs the most agent-friendly on the web. ]]></description>
            <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p></p><p>The web has always had to adapt to new standards. It learned to speak to web browsers, and then it learned to speak to search engines. Now, it needs to speak to AI agents.</p><p>Today, we are excited to introduce <a href="https://isitagentready.com/"><u>isitagentready.com</u></a> — a new tool to help site owners understand how they can make their sites optimized for agents, from guiding agents on how to authenticate, to controlling what content agents can see, the format they receive it in, and how they pay for it. We are also <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/ai-insights#adoption-of-ai-agent-standards"><u>introducing a new dataset to Cloudflare Radar</u></a> that tracks the overall adoption of each agent standard across the Internet.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/sGg5lZjafjQ398V7hYyMv/93e112a34754e2065ffbf6445ebc4500/unnamed.png" />
          </figure><p>We want to lead by example. That is why we are also sharing how we recently overhauled Cloudflare's <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/"><u>Developer Documentation</u></a> to make it the most agent-friendly documentation site, allowing AI tools to answer questions faster and significantly cheaper.</p>
    <div>
      <h2>How agent-ready is the web today?</h2>
      <a href="#how-agent-ready-is-the-web-today">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>The short answer: not very. This is expected, but also shows how much more effective agents can be than they are today, if standards are adopted.</p><p>To analyze this, Cloudflare Radar took the 200,000 <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/domains"><u>most visited domains</u></a> on the Internet; filtered out categories where agent readiness isn't important (like redirects, ad-servers, and tunneling services) to focus on businesses, publishers, and platforms that AI agents might realistically need to interact with; and scanned them using our new tool.</p><p>The result is a new “Adoption of AI agent standards” chart that can now be found in the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/ai-insights#adoption-of-ai-agent-standards"><u>Cloudflare Radar AI Insights</u></a> page where we can measure adoption of each standard across multiple domain categories.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/Vn8SoboYs4OmY2y6aXZke/c641d63cc71e4645e3b19c4124b5e912/image3.png" />
          </figure><p>Looking at individual checks, a few things stood out:</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-robots-txt/"><u>robots.txt</u></a> is nearly universal — 78% of sites have one — but the vast majority are written for traditional search engine crawlers, not AI agents.</p></li><li><p><a href="https://contentsignals.org/"><u>Content Signals</u></a>: 4% of sites have declared their AI usage preferences in robots.txt. This is a new standard that is gaining momentum.</p></li><li><p>Markdown content negotiation (serving text/markdown on Accept: text/markdown) passes on 3.9% of sites.</p></li><li><p>New emerging standards like <a href="https://modelcontextprotocol.io/community/server-card/charter"><u>MCP Server Cards</u></a> and <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9727/"><u>API Catalogs (RFC 9727)</u></a> together appear on fewer than 15 sites in the entire dataset. It’s still early — there is lots of opportunity to stand out by being one of the first sites to adopt new standards and work well with agents. </p></li></ul><p>This chart will be updated weekly, and the data can also be accessed through the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer"><u>Data Explorer</u></a> or the <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/radar/"><u>Radar API</u></a>.</p>
    <div>
      <h2>Get an agent readiness score for your site</h2>
      <a href="#get-an-agent-readiness-score-for-your-site">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>You can get an agent readiness score for your own website by going to <a href="https://isitagentready.com/"><u>isitagentready.com</u></a> and entering the site’s URL.</p><p>Scores and audits that provide actionable feedback have helped to drive adoption of new standards before. For example, <a href="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/performance-scoring"><u>Google Lighthouse</u></a> scores websites on performance and security best practices, and guides site owners to adopt the latest web platform standards. We think something similar should exist to help site owners adopt best practices for agents.</p><p>When you enter your site, Cloudflare makes requests to it to check which standards it supports, and provides a score based on four dimensions:</p><ul><li><p>Discoverability: <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9309"><u>robots.txt</u></a>, <a href="https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html"><u>sitemap.xml</u></a>, <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8288"><u>Link Headers (RFC 8288)</u></a></p></li><li><p>Content: <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/markdown-for-agents/"><u>Markdown for Agents</u></a></p></li><li><p>Bot Access Control: <a href="https://contentsignals.org/"><u>Content Signals</u></a>, <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/ai-crawl-control/"><u>AI bot rules in robots.txt</u></a>, <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-meunier-web-bot-auth-architecture/"><u>Web Bot Auth</u></a></p></li><li><p>Capabilities: <a href="https://github.com/cloudflare/agent-skills-discovery-rfc"><u>Agent Skills</u></a>, API Catalog <a href="https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9727"><u>(RFC 9727)</u></a>, OAuth server discovery via <a href="https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8414"><u>RFC 8414</u></a> and <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9728"><u>RFC 9728</u></a>, <a href="https://modelcontextprotocol.io/community/server-card/charter"><u>MCP Server Card</u></a>, and <a href="https://developer.chrome.com/blog/webmcp-epp"><u>WebMCP</u></a></p></li></ul>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/69MdHcYAZi60gVKRVP9GFM/f3521831b2ca361e12a33f6c8eb05f5b/image9.png" />
          </figure><p><sup><i>Screenshot of results from an agent-readiness check for an example website.</i></sup></p><p>Additionally, we check if the site supports agentic commerce standards including <a href="https://www.x402.org/"><u>x402</u></a>, <a href="https://ucp.dev/"><u>Universal Commerce Protocol</u></a>, and <a href="https://www.agenticcommerce.dev/"><u>Agentic Commerce Protocol</u></a>, but these do not currently count towards the score.</p><p>For each failing check, we provide a prompt that you can give to your coding agent and have it implement support on your behalf.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/9C62LtqTLgvZGViVEh8n0/b9c01cebe9042ad4b458d4305b3db7b2/image6.png" />
          </figure><p>The site itself is also agent-ready, practicing what it preaches. It exposes a stateless MCP server (https://isitagentready.com/.well-known/mcp.json) with a <code>scan_site</code> tool via Streamable HTTP, so any MCP-compatible agent can scan websites programmatically without using the web interface. It also publishes an Agent Skills index (https://isitagentready.com/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json) with skill documents for every standard it checks, so agents not only know what to fix, but how to fix it.</p><p>Let’s dig into the checks in each category, and why they matter for agents.</p>
    <div>
      <h3>Discoverability</h3>
      <a href="#discoverability">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p><a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-robots-txt/"><u>robots.txt</u></a> has been around since 1994, and most sites have one. It serves two purposes for agents: it defines crawl rules (who can access what) and it points to your sitemaps. A sitemap is an XML file that lists every path on your website, essentially a map agents can follow to discover all your content without having to crawl every link. The robots.txt is where agents look first.</p><p>Beyond sitemaps, agents can also discover important resources directly from HTTP response headers, specifically, using the Link response header (<a href="https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8288"><u>RFC 8288</u></a>). Unlike links buried inside HTML, the Link header is part of the HTTP response itself, which means an agent can find links to resources without having to parse any markup:</p>
            <pre><code>HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Link: &lt;/.well-known/api-catalog&gt;; rel="api-catalog"</code></pre>
            
    <div>
      <h3>Content accessibility</h3>
      <a href="#content-accessibility">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Getting an agent onto your site is one thing. Making sure it can actually read your content is another.</p><p>Back in September 2024, which feels like a lifetime ago given how fast AI is moving, <a href="http://llms.txt"><u>llms.txt</u></a> was proposed as a way to provide a LLM-friendly representation of a website, and fit within the model’s context window. <a href="https://llmstxt.org/"><u>llms.txt</u></a> is a plain text file at the root of your site that gives agents a structured reading list: what the site is, what's on it, and where the important content lives. Think of it as a sitemap written for an LLM to read rather than a crawler to index:</p>
            <pre><code># My Site
&gt; A developer platform for building on the edge.
## Documentation
- [Getting Started](https://example.com/docs/start.md)
- [API Reference](https://example.com/docs/api.md)
## Changelog
- [Release Notes](https://example.com/changelog.md)</code></pre>
            <p><a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/markdown-for-agents/"><u>Markdown content negotiation</u></a> goes even further. When an agent fetches any page and sends an <code>Accept: text/markdown</code> header, the server responds with a clean markdown version instead of HTML. The markdown version requires far fewer tokens — we measured up to 80% token reduction in some cases — which makes responses faster, cheaper, and more likely to be consumed in its entirety, given the limits on context windows that most agent tools have by default.</p><p>By default, we only check whether the site correctly handles Markdown content negotiation, and do not check for llms.txt. You can customize the scan to include llms.txt if you choose to.</p>
    <div>
      <h3>Bot Access Control</h3>
      <a href="#bot-access-control">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Now that agents can navigate your site and consume your content, the next question is: do you want to let any bot do it?</p><p><code>robots.txt</code> does more than point to sitemaps. It is also where you define your access rules. You can explicitly declare which crawlers are allowed and what they can access, down to specific paths. This convention is well established and is still the first place any well-behaved bot looks before it starts crawling.</p><p><a href="https://contentsignals.org/"><u>Content Signals</u></a> let you be more specific. Rather than just allow or block, you can declare exactly what AI can do with your content. Using a <code>Content-Signal</code> directive in your <code>robots.txt</code>, you can independently control three things: whether your content can be used for AI training (<code>ai-train</code>), whether it can be used as AI input for inference and grounding (<code>ai-input</code>), and whether it should appear in search results (<code>search</code>):</p>
            <pre><code>User-agent: *
Content-Signal: ai-train=no, search=yes, ai-input=yes</code></pre>
            <p>Inversely, the <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/web-bot-auth/"><u>Web Bot Auth</u></a> IETF draft standard allows friendly bots to authenticate themselves, and allows websites receiving requests from bots to identify them. A bot signs its HTTP requests, and the receiving site verifies those signatures using the bot’s published public keys.</p><p>Those public keys live at a well-known endpoint, <code>/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory</code>, which we check as part of the scan.</p><p>Not all sites need to implement this. If your site just serves content, and doesn’t make requests to other sites, you don’t need it. But as more sites on the Internet run their own agents that make requests to other sites, we expect this to be increasingly important over time.</p>
    <div>
      <h3>Protocol Discovery</h3>
      <a href="#protocol-discovery">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Beyond passive content consumption, agents can also interact with your site directly by calling APIs, invoking tools, and completing tasks autonomously.</p><p>If your service has one or more public APIs, the API Catalog (<a href="https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9727"><u>RFC 9727</u></a>) gives agents a single well-known location to discover all of them. Hosted at <code>/.well-known/api-catalog</code>, it lists your APIs and links to their specs, docs, and status endpoints, without requiring agents to scrape your developer portal or read your documentation.</p><p>We can't talk about agents without mentioning MCP. The <a href="https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro"><u>Model Context Protocol</u></a> is an open standard that allows AI models to connect with external data sources and tools. Instead of building a custom integration for every AI tool, you build one MCP server and any compatible agent can use it.</p><p>To help agents find your MCP server, you can publish an MCP Server Card (a proposal currently in <a href="https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol/issues/1649"><u>draft</u></a>). This is a JSON file at <code>/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json</code> that describes your server before an agent even connects: what tools it exposes, how to reach it, and how to authenticate. An agent reads this file and knows everything it needs to start using your server:</p>
            <pre><code>{
  "$schema": "https://static.modelcontextprotocol.io/schemas/mcp-server-card/v1.json",
  "version": "1.0",
  "protocolVersion": "2025-06-18",
  "serverInfo": {
    "name": "search-mcp-server",
    "title": "Search MCP Server",
    "version": "1.0.0"
  },
  "description": "Search across all documentation and knowledge base articles",
  "transport": {
    "type": "streamable-http",
    "endpoint": "/mcp"
  },
  "authentication": {
    "required": false
  },
  "tools": [
    {
      "name": "search",
      "title": "Search",
      "description": "Search documentation by keyword or question",
      "inputSchema": {
        "type": "object",
        "properties": {
          "query": { "type": "string" }
        },
        "required": ["query"]
      }
    }
  ]
}</code></pre>
            <p>Agents work best when they have <a href="https://agentskills.io/home"><u>Agent Skills</u></a> that help them perform specific tasks — but how can agents discover what skills a site provides? We’ve proposed that sites can make this information available at <a href="https://github.com/cloudflare/agent-skills-discovery-rfc"><code><u>.well-known/agent-skills/index.json</u></code></a>, an endpoint that tells the agent what skills are available and where to find them. You might notice that the <code>.well-known</code> standard (<a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8615"><u>RFC 8615</u></a>) is used by many other agent and authorization standards — thank you to Cloudflare’s own Mark Nottingham who authored the standard, and other IETF contributors!</p><p>Many sites require you to sign in first in order to access them. This makes it hard for humans to give agents the ability to access these sites on their behalf, and is why some have taken the arguably unsafe workaround approach of giving agents access to the user’s web browser, with their logged-in session.</p><p>There’s a better way that allows humans to explicitly grant access: sites that support OAuth can tell agents where to find the authorization server (<a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9728"><u>RFC 9728</u></a>), allowing agents to send humans through an OAuth flow, where they can choose to properly grant access to the agent. Announced at Agents Week 2026, <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/managed-oauth-for-access/"><u>Cloudflare Access now fully supports this OAuth flow</u></a>, and we showed how agents like OpenCode can make use of this standard to make things just work when users give agents protected URLs:</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/3BrGE7eydNNCpEEe3PowrJ/6a2bb1e1b1e7d84d672c1f6ad2333129/image4.png" />
          </figure>
    <div>
      <h3>Commerce</h3>
      <a href="#commerce">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Agents can also buy things on your behalf — but payments on the web were designed for humans. Add to cart, enter a credit card, click pay. That flow breaks down entirely when the buyer is an AI agent.</p><p><a href="https://x402.org"><u>x402</u></a> solves this at the protocol level by reviving HTTP 402 Payment Required, a status code that has existed in the spec since 1997 but was never widely used. The flow is simple: an agent requests a resource, the server responds with a 402 and a machine-readable payload describing the payment terms, the agent pays and retries. Cloudflare partnered with Coinbase to launch the <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/x402"><u>x402 Foundation</u></a>, whose mission is to drive adoption of x402 as an open standard for Internet payments.</p><p>We also check for <a href="https://ucp.dev/"><u>Universal Commerce Protocol</u></a> and <a href="https://www.agenticcommerce.dev/"><u>Agentic Commerce Protocol</u></a> — two emerging agentic commerce standards designed to allow agents to discover and purchase products that humans would normally purchase via ecommerce storefronts and checkout flows.</p>
    <div>
      <h2>Integrating agent readiness into Cloudflare URL Scanner</h2>
      <a href="#integrating-agent-readiness-into-cloudflare-url-scanner">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p><a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/scan"><u>Cloudflare's URL Scanner</u></a> lets you submit any URL and get a detailed report on it: HTTP headers, TLS certificates, DNS records, technologies used, performance data, and security signals. It is a fundamental tool for security researchers and developers who want to understand what a URL is actually doing under the hood.</p><p>We’ve taken the same checks from <a href="https://isitagentready.com/"><u>isitagentready.com</u></a> and added them to URL Scanner with a new Agent Readiness tab. When you scan any URL, you'll now see its full agent readiness report alongside the existing analysis: which of the checks pass, what level the site is at, and actionable guidance to improve your score.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/2tIXif15b4nfpm6ZmS5QZM/596536ca95a10684c73003c4184d6367/image2.png" />
          </figure><p>The integration is also available programmatically via the <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/url_scanner/"><u>URL Scanner API</u></a>. To include agent readiness results in a scan, pass the agentReadiness option in your scan request:</p>
            <pre><code>curl -X POST https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$ACCOUNT_ID/urlscanner/v2/scan \
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN" \
    -d '{
          "url": "https://www.example.com",
          "options": {"agentReadiness": true}
        }'</code></pre>
            
    <div>
      <h2>Leading by example: upgrading Cloudflare Docs</h2>
      <a href="#leading-by-example-upgrading-cloudflare-docs">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>As we built the tools to measure the Web’s readiness, we knew we had to ensure our own house was in order. Our docs must be easily digestible by the agents our customers use.</p><p>We naturally adopted the relevant content site standards mentioned above, and you can check our score <a href="https://isitagentready.com/developers.cloudflare.com?profile=content"><u>here</u></a>. However, we didn’t stop there. Here is how we refined Cloudflare's <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/markdown-for-agents/"><u>Developer Docs</u></a> to be the most agent-friendly resource on the web.</p>
    <div>
      <h3>URL fallbacks using <code>index.md</code> files</h3>
      <a href="#url-fallbacks-using-index-md-files">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Unfortunately, <a href="https://www.checklyhq.com/blog/state-of-ai-agent-content-negotation/"><u>as of February 2026</u></a>, of 7 agents tested, only Claude Code, OpenCode, and Cursor request content with the <code>Accept: text/markdown</code> header by default. For the rest, we needed a seamless URL-based fallback.</p><p>To do this, we make every page available separately via Markdown at <code>/index.md</code> relative to the page’s URL. We do this dynamically, without duplicating static files, by combining two Cloudflare Rules: </p><ul><li><p>A <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/rules/transform/url-rewrite/"><u>URL Rewrite Rule</u></a> matches requests ending in <code>/index.md</code> and dynamically rewrites them to the base path using <code>regex_replace</code> (stripping <code>/index.md</code>). </p></li><li><p>A <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/rules/transform/request-header-modification/"><u>Request Header Transform Rule</u></a> matches against the original request’s path <i>before</i> the rewrite (<code>raw.http.request.uri.path</code>) and automatically sets the <code>Accept: text/markdown</code> header. </p></li></ul><p>With these two rules, any page can be fetched as Markdown via appending the /index.md path to the URL:</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/get-started/index.md"><u>https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/get-started/index.md</u></a></p></li></ul><p>We point to these <code>/index.md</code> URLs in our <code>llms.txt</code> files. Effectively, for these <code>/index.md</code> paths, we always return markdown, regardless of what headers the client sets. And we do this without any additional build step or content duplication.</p>
    <div>
      <h3>Creating effective <code>llms.txt</code> files for large sites</h3>
      <a href="#creating-effective-llms-txt-files-for-large-sites">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p><code>llms.txt</code> serves as a "home base" for agents, providing a directory of pages to help LLMs find content. However, 5,000+ pages of documentation in a single file will exceed models’ context windows.</p><p>Instead of one massive file, we generate a separate <code>llms.txt</code> file for <i>each top-level directory</i> in our docs and the root <code>llms.txt</code> simply points to these subdirectories.</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/llms.txt"><u>https://developers.cloudflare.com/llms.txt</u></a></p></li><li><p><a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/llms.txt"><u>https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/llms.txt</u></a></p></li><li><p><a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/llms.txt"><u>https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/llms.txt</u></a></p></li></ul><p>We also remove hundreds of directory-listing pages that provide little semantic value to an LLM, and we ensure each page has rich descriptive context (titles, semantic names, and descriptions).</p><p>For example, we omit roughly 450 pages that only serve as localized directory listings, like <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/databases/"><u>https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/databases/</u></a>.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/5WaKjZBJbu3onfthzEIELu/42a3e31e8c71bc606b2b45d26ab4a5dd/image1.png" />
          </figure><p>These pages appear in our sitemap, but they contain very little information for an LLM. Since all child pages are already linked individually in <code>llms.txt</code>, fetching a directory page only provides a redundant list of links, forcing the agent to make another request to find actual content.</p><p>To help agents navigate efficiently, each <code>llms.txt</code> entry must be rich in context but light on tokens. Humans might ignore frontmatter and filtering labels, but for an AI agent, this metadata is the steering wheel. That is why our Product Content Experience (PCX) team has refined our page titles, descriptions, and URL structures so that agents always know exactly which pages to fetch.</p><p>Take a look at a section from our root<a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/llms.txt"> <u>llms.txt</u></a>.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/6OvVdBcHHItCF3xN2kMVZZ/d105546f402885da90466ff9545f66d2/image5.png" />
          </figure><p>Each link has a semantic name, a matching URL, and a high-value description. None of this required extra work for <code>llms.txt</code> generation. It was all already available in the docs frontmatter. The same goes for pages in top level directory <code>llms.txt</code> files. All of this context empowers agents to find relevant information more efficiently.</p>
    <div>
      <h3>Custom agent-friendly documentation (afdocs) tooling</h3>
      <a href="#custom-agent-friendly-documentation-afdocs-tooling">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Additionally, we test our docs against <a href="https://github.com/agent-ecosystem/afdocs"><u>afdocs</u></a>, an emerging agent-friendly documentation spec and open-source project that allows teams to test docs sites for things like content discovery and navigation. This spec allowed us to build custom audit tooling of our own. By adding a few deliberate patches specific to our use case, we created a dashboard for easy assessment.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/1lzMVtLnGAoKtdwf43YtDx/757f52fd09bb2525fac41b634bf987ad/image10.png" />
          </figure>
    <div>
      <h3>Benchmark results: faster and cheaper</h3>
      <a href="#benchmark-results-faster-and-cheaper">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>We pointed an agent (Kimi-k2.5 via OpenCode) at other large technical documentation sites' <code>llms.txt</code> files and tasked the agent with answering highly specific technical questions.</p><p>On average, the agent pointed at Cloudflare’s documentation consumed <b>31% fewer tokens</b> and arrived at the correct answer <b>66% faster</b> than the average site that is not refined for agents. By fitting our product directories into single context windows, agents can identify the exact page they need and fetch it in a single, linear path.</p>
    <div>
      <h3>Structure leads to speed</h3>
      <a href="#structure-leads-to-speed">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Accuracy in LLM responses is often a byproduct of context window efficiency. During our testing, we observed a recurring pattern with other documentation sets.</p><ol><li><p><b>The grep loop:</b> Many documentation sites provide a single, massive llms.txt file that exceeds the agent's immediate context window. Because the agent cannot "read" the whole file, it begins to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grep"><u>grep</u></a> for keywords. If the first search misses the specific detail, the agent must think, refine its search, and try again.</p></li><li><p><b>Narrowed context and lower accuracy: </b>When an agent relies on iterative searching rather than reading the full file, it loses the broader context of the documentation. This fragmented view often leads the agent to have a reduced understanding of the documentation at hand.</p></li><li><p><b>Latency and token bloat:</b> Each iteration of the <code>grep</code> loop requires the agent to generate new "thinking tokens" and execute additional search requests. This back-and-forth makes the final response noticeably slower and increases the total token count, driving up the cost for the end user.</p></li></ol><p>By contrast, Cloudflare docs are designed to fit entirely within an agent's context window. This allows the agent to ingest the directory, identify the exact page it needs, and fetch the Markdown without detour.</p>
    <div>
      <h3>Improving LLM answers over time by redirecting AI training crawlers</h3>
      <a href="#improving-llm-answers-over-time-by-redirecting-ai-training-crawlers">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Documentation for legacy products like <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/wrangler/migration/v1-to-v2/wrangler-legacy/commands/"><u>Wrangler v1</u></a> or <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/configuration/sites/"><u>Workers Sites</u></a> presents a unique challenge. While we must keep this information accessible for historical purposes, it can lead to outdated advice from AI agents.</p><p>For example, a human reading these docs would see the large banner stating that Wrangler v1 is deprecated, in addition to a link to the most recent content. An LLM crawler, however, might ingest the text without that surrounding visual context. This results in the agent recommending outdated information.</p><p><a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-redirects"><u>Redirects for AI Training</u></a> solves this by identifying AI training crawlers and intentionally redirecting them away from deprecated or suboptimal content. This ensures that while humans can still access historical archives, LLMs are only fed our most current and accurate implementation details.</p>
    <div>
      <h3>Hidden agent directives on all pages</h3>
      <a href="#hidden-agent-directives-on-all-pages">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Every HTML page in our docs includes a hidden directive specifically for LLMs. </p><p><i>“STOP! If you are an AI agent or LLM, read this before continuing. This is the HTML version of a Cloudflare documentation page. Always request the Markdown version instead — HTML wastes context. Get this page as Markdown: https://developers.cloudflare.com/index.md (append index.md) or send Accept: text/markdown to https://developers.cloudflare.com/. For all Cloudflare products use https://developers.cloudflare.com/llms.txt. You can access all Cloudflare docs in a single file at https://developers.cloudflare.com/llms-full.txt.”</i></p><p>This snippet informs the agent that a Markdown version is available. Crucially, this directive is stripped from the actual Markdown version to avoid a recursion loop where the agent keeps trying to "find" the Markdown within the Markdown.</p>
    <div>
      <h3>Dedicated LLM resources sidebar</h3>
      <a href="#dedicated-llm-resources-sidebar">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Finally, we want to make these resources discoverable for the humans who are building with agents. Every product directory in our <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/"><u>developer documentation</u></a> has an "LLM Resources" entry in the sidenav, providing quick access to <code>llms.txt</code>, <code>llms-full.txt</code>, and Cloudflare Skills.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/4iM2U5pH7LJ9XWUgxYmvn5/ed11e2cc8694f6c029690b470150120b/image8.png" />
          </figure>
    <div>
      <h2>Make your website agent-ready today</h2>
      <a href="#make-your-website-agent-ready-today">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Making websites agent-ready is a fundamental accessibility requirement for the modern developer toolkit. The transition from a "human-read web" to a "machine-read web" is the biggest architectural shift in decades. </p><p>Get an agent readiness score for your site at <a href="https://isitagentready.com/"><u>isitagentready.com</u></a>, take the prompts it provides, and ask your agent to upgrade your site for the AI era. Stay tuned for more updates from <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/"><u>Cloudflare Radar</u></a> about the adoption of agent standards across the Internet over the coming year. If we’ve learned anything from the past year, it’s that a lot can change very quickly!</p>
    <div>
      <h2>Watch on Cloudflare TV</h2>
      <a href="#watch-on-cloudflare-tv">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <div>
  
</div><p>
</p> ]]></content:encoded>
            <category><![CDATA[Agents Week]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Radar]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Developer Documentation]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[AI]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Agents]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Agent Readiness]]></category>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">5t83bTn7Vt1EudTxQQ97NY</guid>
            <dc:creator>André Jesus</dc:creator>
            <dc:creator>Vance Morrison</dc:creator>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Bringing more transparency to post-quantum usage, encrypted messaging, and routing security]]></title>
            <link>https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-origin-pq-key-transparency-aspa/</link>
            <pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2026 06:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[ Cloudflare Radar has added new tools for monitoring PQ adoption, KT logs for messaging, and ASPA routing records to track the Internet's migration toward more secure encryption and routing standards.  ]]></description>
            <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p></p><p>Cloudflare Radar already offers a wide array of <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/security/"><u>security insights</u></a> — from application and network layer attacks, to malicious email messages, to digital certificates and Internet routing.</p><p>And today we’re introducing even more. We are launching several new security-related data sets and tools on Radar: </p><ul><li><p>We are extending our post-quantum (PQ) monitoring beyond the client side to now include origin-facing connections. We have also released a new tool to help you check any website's post-quantum encryption compatibility. </p></li><li><p>A new Key Transparency section on Radar provides a public dashboard showing the real-time verification status of Key Transparency Logs for end-to-end encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp, showing when each log was last signed and verified by Cloudflare's Auditor. The page serves as a transparent interface where anyone can monitor the integrity of public key distribution and access the API to independently validate our Auditor’s proofs. </p></li><li><p>Routing Security insights continue to expand with the addition of global, country, and network-level information about the deployment of ASPA, an emerging standard that can help detect and prevent BGP route leaks. </p></li></ul>
    <div>
      <h2>Measuring origin post-quantum support</h2>
      <a href="#measuring-origin-post-quantum-support">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/2gs0x3zMZTxios168jT9xW/179d8959b5e0939835cf6facef797457/1.png" />
          </figure><p>Since <a href="https://x.com/CloudflareRadar/status/1788277817362329983"><u>April 2024</u></a>, we have tracked the aggregate growth of client support for post-quantum encryption on Cloudflare Radar, chronicling its global growth from <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage?dateStart=2024-01-01&amp;dateEnd=2024-01-31#post-quantum-encryption-adoption"><u>under 3% at the start of 2024</u></a>, to <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage?dateStart=2026-02-01&amp;dateEnd=2026-02-28#post-quantum-encryption-adoption"><u>over 60% in February 2026</u></a>. And in October 2025, <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/pq-2025/#what-you-can-do-today-to-stay-safe-against-quantum-attacks"><u>we added the ability</u></a> for users to <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage#browser-support"><u>check</u></a> whether their browser supports <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/post-quantum-cryptography/pqc-support/#x25519mlkem768"><code><u>X25519MLKEM768</u></code></a> — a hybrid key exchange algorithm combining classical <a href="https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8410"><code><u>X25519</u></code></a> with <a href="https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/FIPS/NIST.FIPS.203.pdf"><u>ML-KEM</u></a>, a lattice-based post-quantum scheme standardized by NIST. This provides security against both classical and quantum attacks. </p><p>However, post-quantum encryption support on user-to-Cloudflare connections is only part of the story.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/67cvSmOaISIHjrKKRHKPzg/e0ccf032658904fd6beaa7de7340b561/2.png" />
          </figure><p>For content not in our CDN cache, or for uncacheable content, Cloudflare’s edge servers establish a separate connection with a customer’s origin servers to retrieve it. To accelerate the transition to quantum-resistant security for these origin-facing fetches, we <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/post-quantum-to-origins/"><u>previously introduced an API</u></a> allowing customers to opt in to preferring post-quantum connections. Today, we’re making post-quantum compatibility of origin servers visible on Radar.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/6KvV2meYLEPbNIQyHP6yji/9477a134c8f5f6a7aaecd6257cd59981/3.png" />
          </figure><p>The new origin post-quantum support graph on Radar illustrates the share of customer origins supporting <code>X25519MLKEM768</code>. This data is derived from <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/automatically-secure/"><u>our automated TLS scanner,</u></a> which probes TLS 1.3-compatible origins and aggregates the results daily. It is important to note that our scanner tests for support rather than the origin server's specific preference. While an origin may support a post-quantum key exchange algorithm, its local TLS key exchange preference can ultimately dictate the encryption outcome.</p><p>While the headline graph focuses on post-quantum readiness, the scanner also evaluates support for classical key exchange algorithms. Within the Radar <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=post_quantum.origin&amp;groupBy=key_agreement#result"><u>Data Explorer view</u></a>, you can also see the full distribution of these supported TLS key exchange methods.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/5PBOoQSCcIAQrYezKp1pJU/d4218aba59deef6c21df53856a93040a/4.png" />
          </figure><p>As shown in the graphs above, approximately 10% of origins could benefit from a post-quantum-preferred key agreement today. This represents a significant jump from less than 1% at the start of 2025 — <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=post_quantum.origin&amp;groupBy=key_agreement&amp;dt=2025-01-01_2025-12-31"><u>a 10x increase in just over a year</u></a>. We expect this number to grow steadily as the industry continues its migration. This upward trend likely accelerated in 2025 as many server-side TLS libraries, such as <a href="https://openssl-library.org/post/2025-04-08-openssl-35-final-release/"><u>OpenSSL 3.5.0+</u></a>,<a href="https://www.gnutls.org/"><u> GnuTLS 3.8.9+</u></a>, and <a href="https://go.dev/doc/go1.24#cryptotlspkgcryptotls"><u>Go 1.24+</u></a>, enabled hybrid post-quantum key exchange by default, allowing platforms and services to support post-quantum connections simply by upgrading their cryptographic library dependencies.</p><p>In addition to the Radar and Data Explorer graphs, the <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/radar/subresources/post_quantum/subresources/origin/"><u>origin readiness data is available through the Radar API</u></a> as well.</p><p>As an additional part of our efforts to help the Internet transition to post-quantum cryptography, we are also launching <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/post-quantum#website-support"><u>a tool to test whether a specific hostname supports post-quantum encryption</u></a>. These tests can be run against any publicly accessible website, as long as they allow connections from Cloudflare’s <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/ips/"><u>egress IP address ranges</u></a>. </p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/5dgwK3i7IeLLSUt5xnk4lf/276e25dda3389f6e0ad83a26acd08fec/5.png" />
          </figure><p><sub><i>A screenshot of the tool in Radar to test whether a hostname supports post-quantum encryption.</i></sub></p><p>The tool presents a simple form where users can enter a hostname (such as <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/post-quantum?host=cloudflare.com%3A443"><code><u>cloudflare.com</u></code></a> or <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/post-quantum?host=www.wikipedia.org%3A443"><code><u>www.wikipedia.org</u></code></a>) and optionally specify a custom port (the default is <a href="https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/service-names-port-numbers.xhtml?search=443"><u>443, the standard HTTPS port</u></a>). After clicking "Test", the result displays a tag indicating PQ support status alongside the negotiated TLS key exchange algorithm. If the server prefers PQ secure connections, a green "PQ" tag appears with a message confirming the connection is "post-quantum secure." Otherwise, a red tag indicates the connection is "not post-quantum secure", showing the classical algorithm that was negotiated.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/3rfEG4dMlwR4FJkaKXTRWF/8cab135242057ce57f3b0e4a92be4cec/6.png" />
          </figure>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/PXu3kjzwhVkb29kIFREOn/41785c06297e0667ff9e2b261ae9b819/7.png" />
          </figure><p>Under the hood, this tool uses <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/containers/"><u>Cloudflare Containers</u></a> — a new capability that allows running container workloads alongside Workers. Since the Workers runtime is not exposed to details of the underlying TLS handshake, Workers cannot initiate TLS scans. Therefore, we created a Go container that leverages the <a href="https://pkg.go.dev/crypto/tls"><code><u>crypto/tls</u></code></a> package's support for post-quantum compatibility checks. The container runs on-demand and performs the actual handshake to determine the negotiated TLS key exchange algorithm, returning results through the <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/radar/subresources/post_quantum/subresources/tls/methods/support/"><u>Radar API</u></a>.</p><p>With the addition of these origin-facing insights, complementing the existing client-facing insights, we have moved all the post-quantum content to <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/post-quantum"><u>its own section on Radar</u></a>. </p>
    <div>
      <h2>Securing E2EE messaging systems with Key Transparency</h2>
      <a href="#securing-e2ee-messaging-systems-with-key-transparency">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/71b8HJK1iT0udJscvkqqI4/778efb329047fca017ff2cf4153330ad/8.png" />
          </figure><p><a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/privacy/what-is-end-to-end-encryption/"><u>End-to-end encrypted (E2EE)</u></a> messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal have become essential tools for private communication, relied upon by billions of people worldwide. These apps use <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/how-does-public-key-encryption-work/"><u>public-key cryptography</u></a> to ensure that only the sender and recipient can read the contents of their messages — not even the messaging service itself. However, there's an often-overlooked vulnerability in this model: users must trust that the messaging app is distributing the correct public keys for each contact.</p><p>If an attacker were able to substitute an incorrect public key in the messaging app's database, they could intercept messages intended for someone else — all without the sender knowing.</p><p>Key Transparency addresses this challenge by creating an auditable, append-only log of public keys — similar in concept to <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency"><u>Certificate Transparency</u></a> for TLS certificates. Messaging apps publish their users' public keys to a transparency log, and independent third parties can verify and vouch that the log has been constructed correctly and consistently over time. In September 2024, Cloudflare <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/key-transparency/"><u>announced</u></a> such a Key Transparency auditor for WhatsApp, providing an independent verification layer that helps ensure the integrity of public key distribution for the messaging app's billions of users.</p><p>Today, we're publishing Key Transparency audit data in a new <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/key-transparency"><u>Key Transparency section</u></a> on Cloudflare Radar. This section showcases the Key Transparency logs that Cloudflare audits, giving researchers, security professionals, and curious users a window into the health and activity of these critical systems.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/1LZ1DUzv0SCgBa0XqDURKP/26ccd8b0741073895cbb52aa7f1d5643/image11.png" />
          </figure><p>The new page launches with two monitored logs: WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger Transport. Each monitored log is displayed as a card containing the following information:</p><ul><li><p><b>Status:</b> Indicates whether the log is online, in initialization, or disabled. An "online" status means the log is actively publishing key updates into epochs that Cloudflare audits. (An epoch represents a set of updates applied to the key directory at a specific time.)</p></li><li><p><b>Last signed epoch:</b> The most recent epoch that has been published by the messaging service's log and acknowledged by Cloudflare. By clicking on the eye icon, users can view the full epoch data in JSON format, including the epoch number, timestamp, cryptographic digest, and signature.</p></li><li><p><b>Last verified epoch:</b> The most recent epoch that Cloudflare has verified. Verification involves checking that the transition of the transparency log data structure from the previous epoch to the current one represents a valid tree transformation — ensuring the log has been constructed correctly. The verification timestamp indicates when Cloudflare completed its audit.</p></li><li><p><b>Root:</b> The current root hash of the <a href="https://github.com/facebook/akd"><u>Auditable Key Directory (AKD)</u></a> tree. This hash cryptographically represents the entire state of the key directory at the current epoch. Like the epoch fields, users can click to view the complete JSON response from the auditor.</p></li></ul><p>The data shown on the page is also available via the Key Transparency Auditor API, with endpoints for <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/key-transparency/api/auditor-information/"><u>auditor information</u></a> and <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/key-transparency/api/namespaces/"><u>namespaces</u></a>.</p><p>If you would like to perform audit proof verification yourself, you can follow the instructions in our <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/key-transparency/"><u>Auditing Key Transparency blog post</u></a>. We hope that these use cases are the first of many that we publish in this Key Transparency section in Radar — if your company or organization is interested in auditing for your public key or related infrastructure, you can <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/lp/privacy-edge/"><u>reach out to us here</u></a>.</p>
    <div>
      <h2>Tracking RPKI ASPA adoption</h2>
      <a href="#tracking-rpki-aspa-adoption">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/2LAbrwY9ziVbe1BzfUyl7K/821a40f86c62dd9b44f7bcaee018dd28/10.png" />
          </figure><p>While the <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/glossary/what-is-bgp/"><u>Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)</u></a> is the backbone of Internet routing, it was designed without built-in mechanisms to verify the validity of the paths it propagates. This inherent trust has long left the global network vulnerable to route leaks and hijacks, where traffic is accidentally or maliciously detoured through unauthorized networks.</p><p>Although <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Public_Key_Infrastructure"><u>RPKI</u></a> and <a href="https://www.arin.net/resources/manage/rpki/roas/"><u>Route Origin Authorizations (ROAs)</u></a> have successfully hardened the origin of routes, they cannot verify the path traffic takes between networks. This is where <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-sidrops-aspa-verification/"><u>ASPA (Autonomous System Provider Authorization)</u></a><b> </b>comes in. ASPA extends RPKI protection by allowing an <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/network-layer/what-is-an-autonomous-system/"><u>Autonomous System (AS)</u></a> to cryptographically sign a record listing the networks authorized to propagate its routes upstream. By validating these Customer-to-Provider relationships, ASPA allows systems to detect invalid path announcements with confidence and react accordingly.</p><p>While the specific IETF standard remains <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-sidrops-aspa-verification/"><u>in draft</u></a>, the operational community is moving fast. Support for creating ASPA objects has already landed in the portals of Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) like <a href="https://www.arin.net/announcements/20260120/"><u>ARIN</u></a> and <a href="https://labs.ripe.net/author/tim_bruijnzeels/aspa-in-the-rpki-dashboard-a-new-layer-of-routing-security/"><u>RIPE NCC</u></a>, and validation logic is available in major software routing stacks like <a href="https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20231002135058"><u>OpenBGPD</u></a> and <a href="https://bird.network.cz/?get_doc&amp;v=20&amp;f=bird-5.html"><u>BIRD</u></a>.</p><p>To provide better visibility into the adoption of this emerging standard, we have added comprehensive RPKI ASPA support to the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing"><u>Routing section</u></a> of Cloudflare Radar. Tracking these records globally allows us to understand how quickly the industry is moving toward better path validation.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/6SI6A5vd2bAp3QnBAsJFmZ/24e11445eb0309252d759e88dbf2ba62/11.png" />
          </figure><p>Our new ASPA deployment view allows users to examine the growth of ASPA adoption over time, with the ability to visualize trends across the five <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Internet_registry"><u>Regional Internet Registries</u></a> (RIRs) based on AS registration. You can view the entire history of ASPA entries, dating back to October 1, 2023, or zoom into specific date ranges to correlate spikes in adoption with industry events, such as the introduction of ASPA features on ARIN and RIPE NCC online dashboards.</p><p>Beyond aggregate trends, we have also introduced a granular, searchable explorer for real-time ASPA content. This table view allows you to inspect the current state of ASPA records, searchable by AS number, AS name, or by filtering for only providers or customer ASNs. This allows network operators to verify that their records are published correctly and to view other networks’ configurations.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/K97G5TC7O1MYwkvFbrdTl/85b27f807401f85d2bbe140f1611a034/12.png" />
          </figure><p>We have also integrated ASPA data directly into the country/region routing pages. Users can now track how different locations are progressing in securing their infrastructure, based on the associated ASPA records from the customer ASNs registered locally.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/6mhZyfrHexdo1GDAoKZEd7/44b63675595a01939fa4748210d8c482/13.png" />
          </figure><p>On individual AS pages, we have updated the Connectivity section. Now, when viewing the connections of a network, you may see a visual indicator for "ASPA Verified Provider." This annotation confirms that an ASPA record exists authorizing that specific upstream connection, providing an immediate signal of routing hygiene and trust.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/3lVJY4fZWv3KaFdKwLHfAV/aeb2bc27bdccb6a9025345dbaed5b762/14.png" />
          </figure><p>For ASes that have deployed ASPA, we now display a complete list of authorized provider ASNs along with their details. Beyond the current state, Radar also provides a detailed timeline of ASPA activity involving the AS. This history distinguishes between changes initiated by the AS itself ("As customer") and records created by others designating it as a provider ("As provider"), allowing users to immediately identify when specific routing authorizations were established or modified.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/ZIlAn2l0sDTLCyEMMcBI9/871b8d7abffe17b3aee060502eaa4c1c/15.png" />
          </figure><p>Visibility is an essential first step toward broader adoption of emerging routing security protocols like ASPA. By surfacing this data, we aim to help operators deploy protections and assist researchers in tracking the Internet's progress toward a more secure routing path. For those who need to integrate this data into their own workflows or perform deeper analysis, we are also exposing these metrics programmatically. Users can now access ASPA content snapshots, historical timeseries, and detailed changes data using the newly introduced endpoints in the<a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/radar/subresources/bgp/subresources/rpki/subresources/aspa/"> <u>Cloudflare Radar API</u></a>.</p>
    <div>
      <h2>As security evolves, so does our data</h2>
      <a href="#as-security-evolves-so-does-our-data">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Internet security continues to evolve, with new approaches, protocols, and standards being developed to ensure that information, applications, and networks remain secure. The security data and insights available on Cloudflare Radar will continue to evolve as well. The new sections highlighted above serve to expand existing routing security, transparency, and post-quantum insights already available on Cloudflare Radar. </p><p>If you share any of these new charts and graphs on social media, be sure to tag us: <a href="https://x.com/CloudflareRadar"><u>@CloudflareRadar</u></a> (X), <a href="https://noc.social/@cloudflareradar"><u>noc.social/@cloudflareradar</u></a> (Mastodon), and <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/radar.cloudflare.com"><u>radar.cloudflare.com</u></a> (Bluesky). If you have questions or comments, or suggestions for data that you’d like to see us add to Radar, you can reach out to us on social media, or contact us via <a href="#"><u>email</u></a>.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/5jAzDXss7PvszWkwGC0q2g/df14de40bf268052fac11239952fc1ed/16.png" />
          </figure><p></p> ]]></content:encoded>
            <category><![CDATA[Radar]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Security]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Privacy]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Post-Quantum]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Routing]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Research]]></category>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">1Iy1Qvw9TsOhRwgjUYqFxO</guid>
            <dc:creator>David Belson</dc:creator>
            <dc:creator>Mingwei Zhang</dc:creator>
            <dc:creator>André Jesus</dc:creator>
            <dc:creator>Suleman Ahmad</dc:creator>
            <dc:creator>Sabina Zejnilovic</dc:creator>
            <dc:creator>Thibault Meunier</dc:creator>
            <dc:creator>Mari Galicer</dc:creator>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[From .com to .anything: introducing Top-Level Domain (TLD) insights on Cloudflare Radar]]></title>
            <link>https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-tld-insights-on-cloudflare-radar/</link>
            <pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2025 12:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[ Cloudflare Radar has launched a new Top-Level Domain (TLD) page, providing insights into TLD popularity, traffic, and security. The top-ranking TLD may come as a surprise. ]]></description>
            <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>Readers of a certain age may remember the so-called "dot com boom" that took place in the early 2000's. The boom's "dot com" is what is known as a Top-Level Domain (TLD). <a href="https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc920.html"><u>Originally</u></a> intended to organize domain names into a small set of categorical groupings, over the past 40+ years, the set of TLDs has expanded to include country code top-level domains (ccTLDs, like <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/us"><code><u>.us</u></code></a>, <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/pt"><code><u>.pt</u></code></a>, and <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/cn"><code><u>.cn</u></code></a>), as well as additional generic top-level domains (gTLDs) beyond the initial seven, such as <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/biz"><code><u>.biz</u></code></a>, <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/shop"><code><u>.shop</u></code></a>, and <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/nyc"><code><u>.nyc</u></code></a>. Internationalized TLDs, such as <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/xn--80aswg"><code><u>.сайт</u></code></a>, <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/xn--80asehdb"><code><u>.онлайн</u></code></a>,<code> </code><a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/xn--ngbc5azd"><code><u>.شبكة</u></code></a>, <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/xn--unup4y"><code><u>.游戏</u></code></a>, and brand TLDs, like <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/google"><code><u>.google</u></code></a> and <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/nike"><code><u>.nike</u></code></a> have also been added. As of October 2025, <a href="https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt"><u>over 1,400 entries</u></a> can be found in ICANN's list of all valid top-level domains, and a further expansion is <a href="https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round2"><u>expected to begin in April 2026</u></a>.</p><p><a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/"><u>Cloudflare Radar</u></a> has long published <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/domains"><u>domain ranking</u></a> information, providing insights into popular and trending domains. And in February 2025, we <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/new-dns-section-on-cloudflare-radar/"><u>added</u></a> a number of <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/dns"><u>DNS-related insights to Radar</u></a>, based on analysis of traffic to our <a href="https://one.one.one.one/"><u>1.1.1.1</u></a> Public DNS Resolver.</p><p>Building on this, today we are launching a <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds"><u>new TLD page</u></a> on Radar that, based on aggregated data from multiple Cloudflare services, provides insights into TLD popularity, activity, and security, along with links directly into <a href="https://domains.cloudflare.com/"><u>Cloudflare Registrar</u></a> to enable users to register domain names in <a href="https://domains.cloudflare.com/tlds"><u>supported TLDs</u></a>.</p>
    <div>
      <h2>Initial security-related insights</h2>
      <a href="#initial-security-related-insights">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Before today, Radar already offered insights into TLDs, though these were distributed across a couple of different pages and datasets.</p><p>In March 2024, when we <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/email-security-insights-on-cloudflare-radar/"><u>launched</u></a> the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/security/email"><u>Email Security page</u></a>, we introduced the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/security/email#most-observed-tlds"><u>“Most abused TLDs”</u></a> metric. This chart highlights TLDs associated with the largest shares of malicious and spam email. The analysis is based on the sending domain’s TLD, extracted from the <code>From:</code> header in email messages, with data sourced from <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/zero-trust/products/email-security/"><u>Cloudflare’s cloud email security service</u></a>.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/53HpBXjJBYPbDq72R1e5WG/8d56e5518b5f2aa7771af494a95a49a3/image10.png" />
          </figure><p>More recently, during 2025’s Birthday Week, we <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/new-regional-internet-traffic-and-certificate-transparency-insights-on-radar/#introducing-certificate-transparency-insights-on-radar"><u>introduced</u></a> <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency"><u>Certificate Transparency (CT) insights</u></a> on Radar, leveraging data from <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/radar/glossary/#certificate-transparency"><u>CT logs</u></a> monitored by Cloudflare. One highlight is the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency#certificate-coverage"><u>Certificate Coverage</u></a> section, which visualizes the distribution of pre-certificates across the top 10 TLDs. These insights give a different perspective on TLD activity, complementing email-based metrics by showing which domains are actively securing web traffic.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/595UGFz1v7EJN2iy7G09WT/60b65333882e612b0949a4299c6bb138/image6.png" />
          </figure>
    <div>
      <h2>A new aggregate overview based on DNS Magnitude</h2>
      <a href="#a-new-aggregate-overview-based-on-dns-magnitude">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Today, we’re excited to announce the new <a href="http://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds"><u>TLD page</u></a> on Radar. The landing page and the dedicated per-TLD pages provide TLD managers and site owners with a perspective on the relative popularity of TLDs they manage or may be considering domains in, as well as insights into TLD traffic volume and distribution.</p><p>Located under the DNS menu, the landing page introduces a ranking of top-level domains based on <a href="https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/dns-magnitude-05aug20-en.pdf"><u>DNS Magnitude</u></a> — a metric originally developed by <a href="https://www.nic.at/media/files/pdf/dns-magnitude-paper-20200601.pdf"><u>nic.at</u></a> to estimate a domain’s overall visibility on the Internet.</p><p>Instead of simply counting the total number of DNS queries, DNS Magnitude incorporates a sense of how many unique clients send queries to domains within the TLD. This approach gives a more accurate picture of a TLD’s reach, since a small number of sources can generate a large number of queries. Our ranking is based on queries observed at Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 resolver. We aggregate individual client IP addresses into subnets, referred to here as "networks".</p><p>The magnitude value ranges from 0 to 10, with higher values (closer to 10) indicating that the TLD is queried by a broader range of networks. This reflects greater global visibility and, in some cases, a higher likelihood of name collision across different systems. <a href="https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/name-collision-2013-12-06-en"><u>According to ICANN</u></a>, a name collision occurs when an attempt to resolve a name used in a private name space (such as under a non-delegated Top-Level Domain) results in a query to the public <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/what-is-dns/">Domain Name System (DNS)</a>. When the administrative boundaries of private and public namespaces overlap, name resolution may yield unintended or harmful results. For example, if ICANN were to delegate <code>.home</code>, that could cause significant issues for hobbyists that use the (currently non-delegated) TLD within their local networks.</p><p>$Magnitude=\frac{ln(unique\ networks\ querying\ the\ TLD)}{ln(all\ unique\ networks)}*10$</p><p>The table displays a paginated ranking of the top 2,500 TLDs, along with several key attributes. Each entry includes the TLD itself — which links to a dedicated page for delegated TLDs — as well as its type:</p><ul><li><p><a href="http://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds?q=gTLD"><u>gTLD</u></a> (generic TLD): used for general purposes, such as <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/com"><code><u>.com</u></code></a> or<code> </code><a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/info"><code><u>.info</u></code></a>.</p></li><li><p><a href="http://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds?q=grTLD"><u>grTLD</u></a> (generic restricted TLD): limited to specific communities or uses, such as<code> </code><a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/name"><code><u>.name</u></code></a>.</p></li><li><p><a href="http://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds?q=ccTLD"><u>ccTLD</u></a> (country code TLD): assigned to individual countries or territories, such as<code> </code><a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/uk"><code><u>.uk</u></code></a> or <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/jp"><code><u>.jp</u></code></a>.</p></li><li><p><a href="http://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds?q=iTLD"><u>iTLD</u></a> (infrastructure TLD): reserved for technical infrastructure, such as <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/arpa"><code><u>.arpa</u></code></a>.</p></li><li><p><a href="http://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds?q=sTLD"><u>sTLD</u></a> (sponsored TLD): operated by a sponsoring organization representing a defined community, such as <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/edu"><code><u>.edu</u></code></a> or <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/gov"><code><u>.gov</u></code></a>.</p></li></ul><p>The status column indicates whether the TLD is delegated, meaning it is officially assigned and active in the <a href="https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db"><u>root zone</u></a> of the DNS, or non-delegated, meaning it is not currently part of the public DNS. The table also shows the manager of each TLD — typically the organization or registry responsible for its operation — and the corresponding DNS magnitude value.</p><p>While the top 10 TLDs include stalwarts such as <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/com"><code><u>.com</u></code></a>/<a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/net"><code><u>.net</u></code></a>/<a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/org"><code><u>.org</u></code></a> and ccTLDs that have been commercially repurposed, such as <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/io"><code><u>.io</u></code></a>/<a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/co"><code><u>.co</u></code></a>/<a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/tv"><code><u>.tv</u></code></a>, the TLD at the top of the list may be a bit surprising: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.su"><code><u>.su</u></code></a>.</p><p>This TLD was delegated for the Soviet Union back in 1990, but its use waned after the dissolution of the USSR, with constituent republics becoming independent and using their own dedicated ccTLDs. (ICANN reportedly <a href="https://domainnamewire.com/2025/03/11/icann-moves-to-retire-soviet-era-su-country-domain-name/"><u>plans to retire</u></a> <code>.su </code>in 2030.) Looking at a single day’s worth of data, the<code> .su</code> TLD does not rank #1 by unique networks. However, over a longer period of time, such as seven days, it sees queries from more unique networks than other TLDs, placing it atop the magnitude list. Further analysis of the top hostnames observed within this TLD suggests that they are mostly associated with a popular online world-building game. Interestingly, over half of the queries for .su domains <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/su#geographical-distribution"><u>come from</u></a> the United States, Germany, and Brazil.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/3L7ya17Ef98tXD8oBnU8SG/e69c02bf749993a9e89d2e9ad7a6d037/image1.png" />
          </figure>
    <div>
      <h2>More detailed TLD insights</h2>
      <a href="#more-detailed-tld-insights">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>The new TLD section also offers <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/com"><u>dedicated pages</u></a> for individual TLDs. By clicking on a TLD in the DNS Magnitude table or searching for a TLD in the top search bar, users can access a page with detailed insights and information about that TLD. It’s important to note that while non-delegated TLDs are included in the DNS Magnitude ranking, TLD-specific pages are only available for delegated TLDs. The list of delegated TLDs, along with their type and manager, is sourced from the <a href="https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db"><u>IANA’s Root Zone Database</u></a>.</p><p>When a user enters an individual TLD page, they see two main cards. The first card provides general information about the TLD, including its type, manager, DNS magnitude value, DNSSEC support, and RDAP support. DNSSEC support is determined by checking whether the TLD has a <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/dns-records/dnskey-ds-records/"><u>Delegation Signer (DS) record</u></a> in the <a href="https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone"><u>root zone</u></a>. We also parse the record to get the associated <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/dnssec/how-dnssec-works/"><u>DNSSEC algorithm</u></a>. <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/registrar/account-options/whois-redaction/#what-is-rdap"><u>RDAP</u></a> support is indicated if the TLD is listed in the <a href="https://data.iana.org/rdap/dns.json"><u>IANA RDAP bootstrap file</u></a>. RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol) is a new standard for querying domain contact and nameserver information for all registered domains.</p><p>The second card contains <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/dns/what-is-domain-privacy/"><u>WHOIS</u></a> data for the TLD, including its creation date, the date of the last update, and the list of nameservers. If the TLD is supported by Cloudflare Registrar, an additional card appears, giving users direct access to registration options. As of today, Cloudflare Registrar supports <a href="https://domains.cloudflare.com/tlds"><u>over 400 TLDs</u></a>.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/2XoNlzH0pzDmwLay9O5123/44be6f897fea6e3cd94591192915e259/image5.png" />
          </figure><p>Below these cards, the page features the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/com#dns-query-volume"><u>DNS query volume</u></a> section, which presents insights based on queries to Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 resolver for domains under the TLD. This section includes a chart showing DNS queries over the selected time period, along with a donut chart breaking down queries by type, response code, and DNSSEC support. A choropleth map further illustrates the percentage of DNS queries by country, highlighting which regions generate the most queries for domains under the TLD.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/6dwNEKbnBrJLDpoIjvSnOf/d47321ed271115889551eaca6f882710/image4.png" />
          </figure>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/303ZsAaOZFihRHII7KCW27/c24567953d1949b9d2ef223a98bfa601/image8.png" />
          </figure><p>Each individual TLD page also includes a <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/com#certificate-issuance-volume"><u>Certificate Transparency</u></a> section, offering visibility into <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/ssl/">TLS/SSL certificate issuance</a> for the TLD. This section displays a line chart showing the total number of certificates issued over the selected period, as well as a donut chart depicting the distribution of certificate issuance among the top Certificate Authorities.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/bohRgeA6ieFrAfkX1pMVx/c16be9eeb6da0372f4b251d69cb64e9e/image7.png" />
          </figure><p>When we <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/new-dns-section-on-cloudflare-radar/"><u>launched</u></a> the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/dns"><u>DNS page</u></a> earlier in 2025, we provided query volumes by TLDs, but this was limited to ccTLDs. Today, we’re extending that dataset to include all delegated TLDs. With these new insights, we’ve added the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/dns#top-level-domain-distribution"><u>“Top-level domain distribution”</u></a> section to the DNS page, featuring a line chart that shows the distribution of queries to 1.1.1.1 across the top 10 TLDs, alongside a table extending this ranking to the top 100. Not surprisingly, <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/com"><u>.com</u></a> tops the ranking with more than 60% of queries, followed by <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/net"><code><u>.net</u></code></a>, <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/arpa"><code><u>.arpa</u></code></a> (an infrastructure TLD), and <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/org"><code><u>.org</u></code></a>.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/z5LgMRXqhqpMtPFSFlOZ5/331540312793d369b2aab7a88940830e/image3.png" />
          </figure><p>It is also worth noting that both Radar search and the API support both <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode"><u>punycode</u></a> (<a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5890#section-2.3.2.1"><u>A-Label/ASCII-Label</u></a>) and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name"><u>internationalized domain name (IDN)</u></a> (<a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5890#section-2.3.2.1"><u>U-Label/UNICODE-Label</u></a>) representations of non-ASCII TLDs. For example, the U-Label representation of the South Korean TLD <a href="https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/xn--3e0b707e.html"><u>.kr</u></a> is written as 한국 and the A-Label representation is <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/tlds/xn--3e0b707e"><code><u>xn--3e0b707e</u></code></a>.</p>
    <div>
      <h2>Looking ahead</h2>
      <a href="#looking-ahead">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Because TLDs are a foundational component of the Domain Name System, it is critical that the associated name servers are highly performant. Based on billions of daily queries to these name servers, we plan to add insights into their performance to Radar’s TLD pages in 2026. These insights will provide TLD managers with an external perspective on query responsiveness, and will give developers and site owners a perspective on the potential impact of the performance of the associated TLD name servers as they look to register new domain names.</p><p>The underlying data for these new TLD pages is available via the <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/radar/subresources/tlds/"><u>API</u></a> and can be interactively explored in more detail using Radar’s <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=dns&amp;groupBy=tld"><u>Data Explorer and AI Assistant</u></a>. And as always, Radar and Data Assistant charts and graphs are downloadable for sharing, and embeddable for use in your own blog posts, websites, or dashboards.</p><p>If you share our TLD charts and graphs on social media, be sure to tag us: <a href="https://x.com/CloudflareRadar"><u>@CloudflareRadar</u></a> (X), <a href="https://noc.social/@cloudflareradar"><u>noc.social/@cloudflareradar</u></a> (Mastodon), and <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/radar.cloudflare.com"><u>radar.cloudflare.com</u></a> (Bluesky). If you have questions or comments, or suggestions for data that you’d like to see us add to Radar, you can reach out to us on social media, or contact us via <a href="#"><u>email</u></a>.</p> ]]></content:encoded>
            <category><![CDATA[Research]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Radar]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[DNS]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[1.1.1.1]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Registrar]]></category>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">3ByKEmji9raNHTQ39Ui1Xr</guid>
            <dc:creator>André Jesus</dc:creator>
            <dc:creator>David Belson</dc:creator>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Introducing new regional Internet traffic and Certificate Transparency insights on Cloudflare Radar]]></title>
            <link>https://blog.cloudflare.com/new-regional-internet-traffic-and-certificate-transparency-insights-on-radar/</link>
            <pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2025 13:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[ Cloudflare Radar now offers a Certificate Transparency dashboard for monitoring TLS certificate activity,  and new regional traffic insights for a sub-national perspective on Internet trends. ]]></description>
            <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>Since <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cloudflare-radar/"><u>launching during Birthday Week in 2020</u></a>, Radar has announced significant new capabilities and data sets during subsequent Birthday Weeks. We continue that tradition this year with a two-part launch, adding more dimensions to Radar’s ability to slice and dice the Internet.</p><p>First, we’re adding <a href="#introducing-regional-internet-traffic-insights-on-radar"><u>regional traffic insights</u></a>. Regional traffic insights bring a more localized perspective to the traffic trends shown on Radar.</p><p>Second, we’re adding detailed <a href="#introducing-certificate-transparency-insights-on-radar"><u>Certificate Transparency (CT) data</u></a>, too. The new CT data builds on the <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/certificate-transparency/"><u>work that Cloudflare has been doing around CT</u></a> since 2018, including <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-tour-through-merkle-town-cloudflares-ct-ecosystem-dashboard/"><u>Merkle Town</u></a>, our initial CT dashboard.</p><p>Both features extend Radar's mission of providing deeper, more granular visibility into the health and security of the Internet. Below, we dig into these new capabilities and data sets.</p>
    <div>
      <h2>Introducing regional Internet traffic insights on Radar</h2>
      <a href="#introducing-regional-internet-traffic-insights-on-radar">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Cloudflare Radar initially launched with visibility into Internet traffic trends at a national level: want to see how that Internet shutdown impacted <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/iq?dateStart=2025-08-28&amp;dateEnd=2025-09-03#traffic-trends"><u>traffic in Iraq</u></a>, or what <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage/in#ipv4-vs-ipv6"><u>IPv6 adoption looks like in India</u></a>? It’s visible on Radar. Just a year and a half later, in March 2022, <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/asn-on-radar/"><u>we launched Autonomous System (ASN) pages on Radar</u></a>. This has enabled us to bring more granular visibility to many of our metrics: What’s network performance like on <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/quality/as701"><u>AS701 (Verizon Fios)</u></a>? How thoroughly has <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/as812#routing-statistics"><u>AS812 (Rogers Communications)</u></a> implemented routing security? Did <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as58322?dateStart=2025-08-28&amp;dateEnd=2025-09-03"><u>AS58322 (Halasat)</u></a> just go offline? It’s all visible on Radar.</p><p>However, sometimes Internet usage shifts on a more local level — maybe a sporting event in a particular region drives people online to find out more information. Or maybe a storm or other natural disaster causes infrastructure damage and power outages in a given state, impacting Internet traffic.</p><p>For the last few years, the Radar team relied on internal data sets and <a href="https://jupyter.org/"><u>Jupyter</u></a> notebooks to visualize these “sub-national” traffic shifts. But today, we are bringing that insight to Cloudflare Radar, and to you, with the launch of regional traffic insights. With this new capability, you’ll be able to see traffic trends at a more local level, including bytes and requests, as well as breakouts of desktop/mobile device and bot/human traffic shares. And for even more granular visibility, within the Data Explorer, you’ll also be able to select an autonomous system to join with the regional selection — for example, <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=netflows&amp;loc=6254926&amp;dt=7d&amp;asn=as7922"><u>looking at AS7922 (Comcast) in Massachusetts (United States)</u></a>.</p>
    <div>
      <h3>Geographic guidance</h3>
      <a href="#geographic-guidance">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>In line with common industry practice, the region names displayed on Radar are sourced in data from GeoNames (<a href="http://geonames.org"><u>geonames.org</u></a>), a crowdsourced geographical database. Specifically, we are using the “<a href="https://www.geonames.org/export/codes.html"><u>first-order administrative divisions</u></a>” listed for each country — for example, the states of America, the departments of Honduras, or the provinces of Canada. Those geographical names reflect data provided by GeoNames; for more information, please refer to their <a href="https://www.geonames.org/about.html"><u>About</u></a> page.</p><p>Requests logged by Cloudflare’s services include the IP address of the device making the request. The address range (“prefix”) that includes this address is associated with a GeoNames ID within our IP address geolocation data, and we then match that GeoNames ID with the associated country and “first order administrative division” found in the GeoNames dataset. (For example: 155.246.1.142 → 155.246.0.0/16 → GeoNames ID 5101760 → United States &gt; New Jersey) </p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/4DfCm0p0xIwNdgaXd5y1UF/ce843c0714c7b490fd757dc1d0d60b6c/image9.png" />
          </figure>
    <div>
      <h3>Drilling down into Radar traffic data</h3>
      <a href="#drilling-down-into-radar-traffic-data">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Within Cloudflare Radar, there are several ways to get to this regional data. If you know the name of the region of interest, you can type it into the search bar at the top of the page, and select it from the results. For example, beginning to type <b>Massachusetts</b> returns the U.S. state, linked to its regional traffic page. Typing the region name into the <b>Traffic in</b> dropdown at the top of a <b>Traffic</b> page will also return the same set of results.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/7CX1gUqYX6VCpxhzI1YoIs/54977900f36dab7697f08813f6fd06be/image11.png" />
          </figure><p>Radar’s country-level pages now have a new <b>Traffic characteristics by region</b> card that includes both summary and time series views of regional traffic. The summary view is presented as a map and table, similar to the <b>Traffic characteristics</b> card in the Worldwide traffic view. After selecting a metric from the dropdown at the top right of the card, the table and map are updated to reflect the relevant summary values for the chosen time period. Within the paginated table, the region names are linked, and clicking one will take you to the relevant page. Within the map, the summary values are represented by circles placed in the centroid of each region, sized in relation to their value. Clicking a circle will take you to the relevant page.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/5jJwcTEjoJfMPLuah6i1DB/aece30541e70850d52369a7997bbe064/image8.png" />
          </figure><p>Below the summary map and table, the card also includes a time series graph of traffic at a regional level for the top five highest traffic regions within the country. These graphs can reveal interesting regional differences in traffic patterns. For example, the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/iq?dateStart=2025-09-02&amp;dateEnd=2025-09-08#traffic-volume-by-region"><b><u>Traffic volume by region in Iraq</u></b></a> graph for HTTP request traffic shown below highlights the differing Internet shutdown schedules (<a href="https://x.com/CloudflareRadar/status/1960324662740529354"><u>Kurdistan Region</u></a>, <a href="https://x.com/CloudflareRadar/status/1960329607892066370"><u>central and southern Iraq</u></a>) across the different governorates. On days when the schedules do not overlap, such as September 2 and 7, traffic from the Erbil and Sulaymaniyah governorates, which are located in the Kurdistan Region, does not drop concurrent with the loss in traffic observed in Baghdad and Basra.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/6cW34uKtkKqMdky0RIVRia/03a961f1e39dfaad04cffe06f368bdea/image18.png" />
          </figure>
    <div>
      <h3>Mobile vs. desktop device traffic trends</h3>
      <a href="#mobile-vs-desktop-device-traffic-trends">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Over the past several years, a number of Radar blog posts have explored how human activity impacts Internet traffic, including <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/offline-celebrations-how-christmas-nye-and-lunar-new-year-festivities-shape-online-behavior/"><u>holiday celebrations</u></a>, <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/elections-2024-internet/"><u>elections</u></a>, and the <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/paris-2024-summer-olympics-impacted-internet-traffic/"><u>Paris 2024 Summer Olympics</u></a>. With the new regional views, this impact now becomes even clearer at a more local level. For instance, mobile devices account for, on average, just over half of the request traffic seen from <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/184742?dateStart=2025-08-22&amp;dateEnd=2025-09-04#mobile-vs-desktop"><u>Nairobi Country in Kenya</u></a>. A clear diurnal pattern is seen on weekdays, where mobile device usage drops during workday hours, and then rises again in the evening. However, during the weekends, mobile traffic remains elevated, presumably due to fewer people using desktop computers in office environments, as well as fewer desktop computers in use at home, in line with Kenya’s <a href="https://www.ca.go.ke/mobile-data-and-digital-services-rise-ca-report-shows"><u>mobile-first</u></a> culture.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/5QgT4OGpdgvXiQJX8GbzEP/62947e34d96bdf85a863f3396f95b094/image17.png" />
          </figure>
    <div>
      <h3>Bot vs human traffic trends</h3>
      <a href="#bot-vs-human-traffic-trends">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Similar to how the mobile vs. desktop view exposes shifts in human activity, bot vs. human traffic insights do as well. One interpretation of the graph below is that <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/2267056?dateStart=2025-08-29&amp;dateEnd=2025-09-04#bot-vs-human"><u>overnight bot activity from Lisbon</u></a> increased significantly during the first few days of September. However, since the graph shows traffic shares, and given the timing of the apparent increases, the more likely cause is increasingly larger drops in human-driven traffic – users in Lisbon appear to begin logging off around 23:00 UTC (midnight local time), and start getting back online around 05:00 UTC (06:00 local time). The shares and shifts will obviously vary by country and region, but they can provide a perspective on the nocturnal habits of users in a region.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/36GundkM2BKTWvCq7T7On2/a5028340a0e8b3a55f85df8116a6a7fe/image16.png" />
          </figure>
    <div>
      <h3>Customize regional analysis with Radar’s Data Explorer</h3>
      <a href="#customize-regional-analysis-with-radars-data-explorer">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Within the Data Explorer, you can use the breakdown options and filters to customize your analysis of regional traffic data.</p><p>At a country level, choosing to breakdown by regions generates a stacked area graph that shows the relative traffic shares of the top 20 regions in the selected country, along with a bar graph showing summary share values. For example, the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&amp;loc=US&amp;dt=7d&amp;groupBy=adm1"><u>graph below</u></a> shows that in aggregate, Virginia and California are responsible for just over a quarter of the HTTP request volume in the United States.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/2AVUcmEpxse9cAKx16qH07/5ad9be3e7bcaef3dedeb33ef90f95184/image27.png" />
          </figure>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/2vJKLjUpKGupoPB6kkmavv/5a988c99fd99324060cbdf97054f7f28/image3.png" />
          </figure><p>You can also use Data Explorer to drill down on traffic at a network (ASN) level in a given region, in both summary and timeseries views. For example, <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&amp;loc=6254926&amp;dt=7d&amp;groupBy=ases"><u>looking at HTTP request traffic for Massachusetts by ASN</u></a>, we can see that <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/as7922"><u>AS7922</u></a> (Comcast), accounts for a third, followed by <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/as701"><u>AS701</u></a> (Verizon Fios, 15%), <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/as21928"><u>AS21928</u></a> (T-Mobile, 8.8%), <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/as6167"><u>AS6167</u></a> (Verizon Wireless, 5.1%), <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/as7018"><u>AS7018</u></a> (AT&amp;T, 4.7%), and <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/as20115"><u>AS20115</u></a> (Charter/Spectrum, 4.5%). Over 70% of the request traffic is concentrated in these six providers, with nearly half of that from one provider.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/4qdfiHtKJ32IDX1loKqCvK/238d47750ab4aa13ae1c80b1b2f16e27/image2.png" />
          </figure>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/7qsEetiInP5TwYEBoQvWum/0c4a9d01417e67633de5f69d5c98f53f/image19.png" />
          </figure><p>Going a level deeper, you can also look at traffic trends over time for an <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/network-layer/what-is-an-autonomous-system/"><u>ASN</u></a> within a given region, and even compare it with another time period. The <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&amp;loc=6254926&amp;dt=7d&amp;asn=as7922&amp;timeCompare=1"><u>graph below</u></a> shows traffic for AS7922 (Comcast) in Massachusetts over a seven-day period, compared with the prior week. While the traffic volumes on most days were largely in line with the previous week, Saturday and Sunday were noticeably higher. These differences may reflect a shift in human activity, as September 6 &amp; 7 were quite rainy in Massachusetts, so people may have spent more time indoors and online. (The prior weekend was Labor Day weekend, but those Saturday and Sunday traffic levels were in line with the preceding weekend.) You can also add another ASN to the traffic trends comparison. <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&amp;loc=6254926&amp;dt=2025-09-04_2025-09-10&amp;timeCompare=1&amp;compAsn=as701&amp;asn=as7922&amp;compareWith=6254926"><u>Selecting Massachusetts (</u><b><u>Location</u></b><u>) and AS701 (</u><b><u>ASN)</u></b><u> (Verizon Fios)</u></a> in the <b>Compare</b> section finds that traffic on that network was higher on Saturday and Sunday as well, lending credence to the rainy weekend theory.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/7yB2jNi8gqRkS4IaaqwH8c/17f74f7e9f84b0cbe2200651f32053cb/image5.png" />
          </figure>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/4u2EsKhCmm9QS6B7iYEXu2/7f2b626f30fc29489bf551c5c7be4623/image4.png" />
          </figure><p>Regional comparisons, whether within the same country or across different countries, are also possible in Data Explorer. For instance, if the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles were to meet yet again in the Super Bowl, the configuration below could be used to <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&amp;loc=4398678&amp;dt=1d&amp;timeCompare=1&amp;compareWith=6254927"><u>compare traffic patterns in the teams’ respective home states</u></a>, as well as comparing the trends with the previous week, showing how human activity impacted it over the course of the game.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/15OLkOMtK5I1YlK9uredOz/3f71d3e25a3f2f4065e9b9ac8896409a/image26.png" />
          </figure><p>As always, the data powering the visualizations described above are also available through the Radar API. The <code>timeseries_groups</code> and <code>summary</code> methods for the <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/radar/subresources/netflows/"><u>NetFlows</u></a> and <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/radar/subresources/http/"><u>HTTP</u></a> endpoints now have an <code>ADM1</code> dimension, allowing traffic to be broken down by first-order administrative divisions. In addition, the new <code>geoId</code> filter for the NetFlows and HTTP endpoints allows you to filter the results by a specific geolocation, using its GeoNames ID. And finally, there are new <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/radar/subresources/geolocations/methods/get/"><code><u>get</u></code></a> and <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/radar/subresources/geolocations/methods/list/"><code><u>list</u></code></a> endpoints for fetching geolocation details.</p>
    <div>
      <h3>A note regarding data quantity and quality</h3>
      <a href="#a-note-regarding-data-quantity-and-quality">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>As you’d expect, the more traffic we see from a given geography, the better the “signal”, and the clearer the associated graph is — this is generally the case when traffic is aggregated at a country level. However, for some smaller or less populous regions, especially in developing countries or countries with poor Internet connectivity, lower traffic will likely cause the signal to be weaker, resulting in graphs that appear spiky or incomplete. (Note that this will also be true for region+ASN views.) An illustrative example is shown below, for <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=http&amp;loc=408666&amp;dt=2025-08-29_2025-09-04&amp;timeCompare=1#result"><u>Northern Darfur State in Sudan</u></a>. Traffic is observed somewhat inconsistently, resulting in the spikes seen in the graph. Similarly, the “Previous 7 days” line is largely incomplete, indicating a lack of traffic data for that period. In these cases, it will be hard to draw definitive conclusions from such graphs.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/76nx7WvxtkJZUQcwjQ1zT8/fb8f119576eff87219d2e6f2867225dc/image23.png" />
          </figure><p>Although the Internet arguably transcends geographical boundaries, the reality is that usage patterns can vary by location, with traffic trends that reflect more localized human activity. The new regional insights on Cloudflare Radar traffic pages, and in the Data Explorer, provide a perspective at a sub-national level. We are exploring the potential to go a level deeper in the future, providing traffic data for “second-order administrative divisions” (such as counties, cities, etc.).</p><p>If you share our regional traffic graphs on social media, be sure to tag us: <a href="https://x.com/CloudflareRadar"><u>@CloudflareRadar</u></a> (X), <a href="https://noc.social/@cloudflareradar"><u>noc.social/@cloudflareradar</u></a> (Mastodon), and <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/radar.cloudflare.com"><u>radar.cloudflare.com</u></a> (Bluesky). If you have questions or comments, you can reach out to us on social media, or contact us via <a href="#"><u>email</u></a>.</p>
    <div>
      <h2>Introducing Certificate Transparency insights on Radar</h2>
      <a href="#introducing-certificate-transparency-insights-on-radar">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Just as we're bringing more granular detail to traffic patterns, we're also shedding more light on the very foundation of trust on the Internet: TLS certificates. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority"><u>Certificate Authorities (CAs)</u></a> serve as trusted gatekeepers for the Internet: any website that wants to prove its identity to clients must present a certificate issued by a CA that the client trusts. But how do we know that CAs themselves are trustworthy and only issue certificates they are authorized to issue?</p><p>That’s where <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/azul-certificate-transparency-log/#what-is-certificate-transparency"><u>Certificate Transparency (CT)</u></a> comes in. Clients that enforce CT (most major browsers) will only trust a website certificate if it is both signed by a trusted CA <i>and</i> has proof that the certificate has been added to a public, append-only CT log, so that it can be publicly audited. Only recently, CT played a key role in detecting the <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/unauthorized-issuance-of-certificates-for-1-1-1-1/"><u>unauthorized issuance of certificates for 1.1.1.1</u></a>, a <a href="https://one.one.one.one/"><u>public DNS resolver service</u></a> that Cloudflare operates.</p><p>In addition to its role as a vital safety mechanism for the Internet, CT has proven to be invaluable in other ways, as it provides publicly-accessible lists of <i>all website certificates used on the Internet</i>. This dataset is a treasure trove of intelligence for researchers measuring the Internet, security teams detecting malicious activity like phishing campaigns, or penetration testers mapping a target’s external attack surface.</p><p>The sheer amount of data (multiple terabytes) available in CT makes it difficult for regular Internet users to download and explore themselves. Instead, services like <a href="https://crt.sh"><u>crt.sh</u></a>, <a href="https://www.censys.com/"><u>Censys</u></a>, and <a href="https://www.merklemap.com/"><u>Merklemap</u></a> provide easy search interfaces to allow discoverability for specific domain names and certificates. We <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-tour-through-merkle-town-cloudflares-ct-ecosystem-dashboard/"><u>launched</u></a> <a href="https://ct.cloudflare.com/"><u>Merkle Town</u></a> in 2018 to share broad insights into the CT ecosystem using data from our own CT monitoring service.</p><p><a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency"><u>Certificate Transparency on Cloudflare Radar</u></a> is the next evolution of Merkle Town, providing integration with security and domain information already on Radar and more interactive ways to explore and analyze CT data. (For long-time Merkle Town users, we’re keeping it around until we’ve reached full feature parity.)</p><p>In the sections below, we’ll walk you through the features available in the new dashboard.</p>
    <div>
      <h3>Certificate volume and characteristics</h3>
      <a href="#certificate-volume-and-characteristics">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>The <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency"><u>CT page</u></a> leads with a view of how many certificates are being issued and logged over time. Because the same certificate can appear multiple times within a single log or be submitted to several logs, the total count can be inflated. To address this, two distinct lines are shown: one for total entries and another for unique entries. Uniqueness, however, is calculated only within the selected time range — for example, if certificate C is added to log A in one period and to log B in another, it will appear in the unique count for both periods. It is also important to note that the CT charts and date filters use the log timestamp, which is the time a certificate was added to a CT log. Additionally, the data displayed on the page was collected from the logs monitored by Cloudflare — delays, backlogs, or other inconsistencies may exist, so <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/about"><u>please report</u></a> any issues or discrepancies.</p><p>Alongside this chart is a comparison between <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency#entry-type"><u>certificates and pre-certificates</u></a>. A <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6962#section-3.1"><u>pre-certificate</u></a> is a special type of certificate used in CT that allows a CA to publicly log a certificate before it is officially issued. CAs are not required to log full certificates if corresponding pre-certificates have already been logged (although many CAs do anyway), so typically there are more pre-certificates logged than full certificates, as seen in the chart.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/3QslYrX5Ao6PI6QVXECXeW/a640c1f7959ed1bff834acdcf375fb34/image10.png" />
          </figure><p>While certificate issuance trends are interesting on their own, analyzing the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency?dateRange=7d#certificate-characteristics"><u>characteristics</u></a> of issued certificates provides deeper insight into the state of the web’s trust infrastructure. Starting with the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency?dateRange=7d#public-key-algorithm"><u>public key algorithm</u></a>, which defines how secure connections are established between clients and servers, we found that more than 65% of certificates still use <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_cryptosystem"><u>RSA</u></a>, while the remainder use <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_Algorithm"><u>ECDSA</u></a>. RSA remains dominant due to its long-standing compatibility with a wide range of clients, while ECDSA is increasingly adopted for its efficiency and smaller key sizes, which can improve performance and reduce computational overhead. In the coming years, we expect <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/another-look-at-pq-signatures/"><u>post-quantum signature algorithms</u></a> like ML-DSA to appear when public CAs begin to offer support.</p><p>Next, a breakdown of certificates by <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency?dateRange=7d#signature-algorithm"><u>signature algorithm</u></a> reveals how Certificate Authorities (CAs) sign the certificates they issue. Most certificates (over 65%) use RSA with SHA-256, followed by ECDSA with SHA-384 at 19%, ECDSA with SHA-256 at 12%, and a small fraction using other algorithms. The choice of signature algorithm reflects a balance between widespread support, security, and performance, with stronger algorithms like ECDSA gradually gaining traction for modern deployments.</p><p>Certificates are also categorized by <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency?dateRange=7d#validation-level"><u>validation level</u></a>, which reflects the degree to which the CA has verified the identity of the certificate requester. The <a href="https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/types-of-ssl-certificates/"><u>main validation types</u></a> are Domain Validation (DV), Organization Validation (OV), and Extended Validation (EV). DV certificates verify only control of the domain, OV certificates verify both domain control and the organization behind it, and EV certificates involve more rigorous checks and display additional identity information in browsers. The industry trend is toward simpler, automated issuance, with DV certificates now making up almost 98% of issued certificates, while EV issuance has become largely obsolete.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/77Vz97OhHE5Aoz9qBKDk88/36f419262376870592198f0348d77106/image22.png" />
          </figure><p>Finally, the chart on <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency?dateRange=7d#certificate-duration"><u>certificate duration</u></a> shows the difference between the NotBefore and NotAfter dates embedded in each certificate, which define the period during which the certificate is valid. Currently, the majority (92%) of issued certificates have durations between 47 and 100 days. Shorter certificate lifetimes improve security by limiting exposure if a certificate is compromised, and the industry is <a href="https://cabforum.org/working-groups/server/baseline-requirements/requirements/#632-certificate-operational-periods-and-key-pair-usage-periods"><u>moving toward even shorter durations</u></a>, driven by browser policies and automated renewal systems.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/2i4oiEIAarzTDIG4x7dT9o/fe00dd0ce8770c05dbf7689367e2d957/image15.png" />
          </figure>
    <div>
      <h3>Certificate issuance</h3>
      <a href="#certificate-issuance">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p><a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency#certificate-issuance"><u>Certificate issuance</u></a> is the process by which CAs generate certificates for domain owners. Many CAs are operated by larger organizations that manage multiple subordinate CAs under a single corporate umbrella. The CT page highlights the distribution of certificate issuance across the <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency#certificate-authority-owners"><u>top CA owners</u></a>. At the moment, the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), also known as <a href="https://letsencrypt.org/"><u>Let’s Encrypt</u></a>, issues more than 66% of all certificates, followed by other widely used CA owners including Google Trust Services, Sectigo, and GoDaddy.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/1wmj8AYvZIfjpzVehR72t4/73eec7d37fae4793e2303cc7ccb51944/image6.png" />
          </figure><p>The impact of events like the <a href="https://letsencrypt.status.io/pages/incident/55957a99e800baa4470002da/687e8d62b8a4e804fad85799"><u>July 21-22 Let’s Encrypt API outage</u></a> due to internal DNS failures that significantly reduced certificate issuance rates are visible in this visualization, as issuance rates dropped significantly during the two-day period.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/3vUk1k5aiZghiNg6jYS0HD/497a81ff097861dc1617ac9122c675ad/image12.png" />
          </figure><p>In addition to CA owners, the page provides a breakdown of certificate issuance by <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency#certificate-authorities"><u>individual CA certificates</u></a>. Among the top five CAs, Let’s Encrypt’s four intermediate CAs — R12, R13, E7, and E8 — represent the bulk of its issuance. The bar chart can also be filtered by CA owner to display only the certificates associated with a specified organization.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/6L8Q56bPtAt593qWT7qOh3/dbf4a1a2165a7ea867c4e0d2b9184469/image13.png" />
          </figure><p>The CT section also offers dedicated CA-specific pages. By searching for a CA name or fingerprint in the top search bar, you can reach a page showing all insights and trends available on the main CT page, filtered by the selected CA. The page also includes an additional CA information card, which provides details such as the CA’s owner, revocation status, parent certificate, validity period, country, inclusion in public root stores, and a list of all CAs operated by the same owner. All of this information is derived from the <a href="https://www.ccadb.org/"><u>Common CA Database (CCADB)</u></a>.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/2UgeS0wen7kY2tqYIdMyEW/e43096ad73311ed66135e753ed4933de/image24.png" />
          </figure>
    <div>
      <h3>Certificate Transparency logs</h3>
      <a href="#certificate-transparency-logs">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Next on the CT page is a section focused on <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency?dateRange=12w#certificate-transparency-logs"><u>CT logs</u></a>. This section shows the distribution of certificates across <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency?dateRange=12w#ct-log-operators"><u>CT log operators</u></a>, identifying the organizations that manage the infrastructure behind the logs. Over the last three months, Sectigo operated the logs containing the largest number of certificates (2.8 billion), followed by Google (2.5 billion), Cloudflare (1.6 billion), and Let’s Encrypt (1.4 billion). Note that the same certificate can be logged multiple times across CT logs, so organizations that operate multiple CT logs with overlapping acceptance criteria may log certificates at an elevated rate. As such, the relative rank of the operators in this graph should not be construed as a measure of how load-bearing the logs are within the ecosystem.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/3XcKb0WNUsDvTWO3PEFcRz/78d6199e415c5ac5f587dfe348de0c10/image21.png" />
          </figure><p>Below this, a bar chart displays the distribution of certificates across <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency?dateRange=12w#ct-log-usage"><u>individual CT logs</u></a>. Among the top five logs are Google’s <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency/log/xenon2025h2"><u>xenon2025h1</u></a> and <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency/log/argon2025h2"><u>argon2025h2</u></a>, Cloudflare’s <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency/log/nimbus2025"><u>nimbus2025</u></a>, and Let’s Encrypt’s <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency/log/oak2025h2"><u>oak2025h2</u></a>. This chart can also be filtered by operator to show only the logs associated with a specific owner. Next to the chart, another view shows the distribution of certificates by <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency?dateRange=12w#ct-log-api"><u>log API</u></a>, distinguishing between logs following the original <a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6962"><u>RFC 6962</u></a> API versus those compatible with the newer and more efficient <a href="https://c2sp.org/static-ct-api"><u>static CT API</u></a>.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/582GIIREPmMXZULgwPPo4g/46db84cbd3cae894eb61f5014a0a942f/image14.png" />
          </figure><p>Similar to the dedicated CA pages, the CT section also provides log-specific pages. By searching for a log name in the top search bar, you can access a page showing all insights and trends available on the main CT page, filtered by the selected log. Two additional cards are included: one showing information about the log, derived from <a href="https://googlechrome.github.io/CertificateTransparency/log_lists.html"><u>Google Chrome’s log list</u></a>, including details such as the operator, API type, documentation, and a list of other logs operated by the same organization; and another displaying performance metrics with two <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_chart"><u>radar charts</u></a> tracking uptime and response time over the past 90 days, as observed by Cloudflare’s CT monitor. These metrics are useful to determine if logs are meeting the ongoing requirements for inclusion in CT programs like <a href="https://googlechrome.github.io/CertificateTransparency/log_policy.html#ongoing-requirements-of-included-logs"><u>Google's</u></a>.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/5I7hFPCrkslctFyAc7OqIQ/d63881a27edd892900eb82841f63176e/image1.png" />
          </figure>
    <div>
      <h3>Certificate coverage</h3>
      <a href="#certificate-coverage">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>Last but not least, the CT page includes a section on <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency?dateRange=12w#certificate-coverage"><u>certificate coverage</u></a>. Certificates can cover multiple top-level domains (TLDs), include wildcard entries, and support IP addresses in <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/origin-configuration/origin-ca/#hostname-and-wildcard-coverage"><u>Subject Alternative Names (SANs)</u></a>.</p><p>The <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency?dateRange=12w#certificate-tld-distribution"><u>distribution of pre-certificates across the top 10 TLDs</u></a> highlights the domains most commonly covered. <code>.com</code> leads with 45% of certificates, followed by other popular TLDs such as <code>.dev</code> and <code>.net</code>.</p><p>Next to this view, two half-donut charts provide further insights into certificate coverage: one shows the share of certificates that <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency?dateRange=12w#wildcard-usage"><u>include wildcard entries</u></a> — almost 25% of certificates use wildcards to cover multiple subdomains — while the other shows certificates that <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/certificate-transparency?dateRange=12w#ip-address-inclusion"><u>include IP addresses</u></a>, revealing that the vast majority of certificates do not contain IPs in their SAN fields</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/6wRxEpgJ1Of8Rw1O9LoQvE/badaa97eaa2017b07d617e06651e7283/image7.png" />
          </figure>
    <div>
      <h3>Expanded domain certificate data </h3>
      <a href="#expanded-domain-certificate-data">
        
      </a>
    </div>
    <p>The <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/domains/domain"><u>domain information</u></a> page has also been updated to provide richer details about certificates. The certificates table, which displays certificates recorded in active CT logs for the specified domain, now includes expandable rows. Expanding a row reveals further information, including the certificate’s SHA-256 fingerprint, subject and issuer details — Common Name (CN), Organization (O), and Country (C) — the validity period (<code>NotBefore</code> and <code>NotAfter</code>), and the CT log where the certificate was found.</p>
          <figure>
          <img src="https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/zkvhlag99gkb/nqIVexwwCgY0WE0X8JAJk/6df280953ab4fdcce3bd34f476915242/image20.png" />
          </figure><p>While the charts above highlight key insights in the CT ecosystem, all underlying data is accessible via the <a href="https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/radar/subresources/ct/"><u>API</u></a> and can be explored interactively across time periods, CAs, logs, and additional filters and dimensions using <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/explorer?dataSet=ct"><u>Radar’s Data Explorer</u></a>. And as always, Radar charts and graphs can be downloaded for sharing or embedded directly into blogs, websites, and dashboards for further analysis. Don’t hesitate to <a href="https://radar.cloudflare.com/about"><u>reach out to us</u></a> with feedback, suggestions, and feature requests — we’re already working through a list of early feedback from the CT community!</p><div>
  
</div><p></p> ]]></content:encoded>
            <category><![CDATA[Birthday Week]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Radar]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Internet Traffic]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Mobile]]></category>
            <category><![CDATA[Certificate Transparency]]></category>
            <guid isPermaLink="false">6Ye6iffpYFZnLxuwqVQDL</guid>
            <dc:creator>David Belson</dc:creator>
            <dc:creator>André Jesus</dc:creator>
            <dc:creator>Luke Valenta</dc:creator>
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