keeping search engine bots happy while blocking scrapers sounds like a narrow topic. It turns out to touch almost every part of how an edge network behaves under attack.
Latency budget
Our budget for the whole filtering pipeline is one millisecond at the 99th percentile. Anything that cannot be decided within that budget runs asynchronously and influences the next request from the same client, not the current one.
That constraint shapes everything: data structures, where state lives and which signals we are willing to compute inline.
What we changed
We moved the decision from a single threshold to a continuous score, added an explanation to every decision and made every rule testable against historical traffic before it goes live.
The result is fewer late-night pages for our analysts and — more importantly — fewer real users challenged by mistake.
What actually happens during a flood
The first thing to fail during a layer 7 flood is almost never bandwidth. It is connection slots, worker processes or database connections on the origin — resources measured in hundreds or thousands, not gigabits. An attacker who can make each request expensive only needs a few thousand requests per second.
That is why we score requests before they are proxied. By the time a request reaches your origin, it has been attributed to a client, compared against that client’s history and weighed against the current load on the route it targets.
Why per-route baselines matter
A thousand requests per second to your homepage is Tuesday. A thousand requests per second to your password-reset endpoint is an attack. Global rate limits cannot tell the difference; per-route baselines can.
We learn the normal shape of traffic per route and per hour of the week, so a surge on a sensitive endpoint raises the risk score long before it approaches a global threshold.
Compliance is a side effect
Regulators increasingly ask for evidence of resilience, not just promises. An incident timeline with start, peak, vectors and impact is exactly the evidence DORA and NIS2 ask for — and it falls out of good observability for free.
We export incident reports in formats auditors can file without anyone rewriting them.
The full incident data behind this post is available to customers in the dashboard under Reports.