Cloudflare detects bot browsing with Precursor, a solution that analyzes behavior in real time

Cloudflare has announced the Precursor widespread availability a web session-level solution to detect modern ‘bots’ under a continuous approach of real-time behavioral analysis, compared to the specific and static controls of CAPTCHAs.

He automated traffic generated by ‘bots’ has surpassed human activity on the Internet and represents approximately 57 percent of all web requests. This milestone shows that the internet has gone from being designed for human clicks to becoming a digital environment dominated by AI agents.

In this context, traditional defenses such as CAPTCHAs are no longer capable of detecting a new generation of automated threats, as Cloudflare has warned, since modern ‘bots’ can simulate a single action to pass a specific security check.

What they cannot do at the moment is replicate the entire journey of a human user. Taking advantage of this gap, Cloudflare has introduced Precursor, a solution that analyzes interactions with a website in real time throughout the session to identify advanced ‘bots’.

Precursor works transparently within web browserswhere it continuously collects advanced signals to block unwanted automated traffic. It is now generally available, as Cloudflare announced in a press release.

To protect the privacy of users, the solution records aggregate patterns of behavior instead of storing the specific actions of each user. To do this, it injects a ‘script’ that evaluates different aspects of user interaction, such as mouse movement, scrolling rate, writing cadence, clipboard activity and the time during which the page remains visible.

Cloudflare servers instantly process telemetry data sent from the user’s browser and analyze it for signs of simulated or computer-generated activity. Subsequently, they verify whether the interaction sequences correspond to coherent human behavior.

By continually evaluating the user journey throughout the entire sessionFor both websites and single-page applications, Precursor prevents automated agents from being able to reset their behavioral footprint by simply refreshing the page.