SearchSeal vs Cloudflare AI Crawl Control
AI Crawl Control is Cloudflare’s console for AI crawler traffic on your zones: analytics by crawler, path and status, plus allow and block controls.
SearchSeal connects to Cloudflare and builds on the same evidence. The difference is the job: Crawl Control is where you enforce, SearchSeal is where you observe, across every host you run.
Cloudflare AI Crawl Control measures
- AI crawler activity on your Cloudflare zones, per crawler over time
- Robots.txt health and which crawlers violate your directives
- Enforcement: allow or block each crawler
SearchSeal measures
- Real requests from AI crawlers to your site: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot and others
- Which pages each crawler read, and the HTTP outcome of every request
- Whether robots.txt or your host is blocking a crawler
- Observed counts with labeled coverage. Unknown is shown as unknown, never as zero
Side by side
Where it runs
Cloudflare AI Crawl Control
Inside the Cloudflare dashboard, per zone
SearchSeal
One dashboard across Cloudflare and non-Cloudflare hosts
Requires Cloudflare
Cloudflare AI Crawl Control
Yes
SearchSeal
No. Any host that can send access logs over HTTPS
Enforcement
Cloudflare AI Crawl Control
Allow or block crawlers, with Cloudflare WAF controls
SearchSeal
None. SearchSeal observes and reports, your host enforces
Fix workflow
Cloudflare AI Crawl Control
Act through Cloudflare controls and WAF
SearchSeal
Evidence-backed issues, fix prompts and access checks
If everything you run is on Cloudflare and your main goal is crawler control, Crawl Control may be all you need. SearchSeal is for a host-independent evidence trail, queryable over REST and MCP.
When Cloudflare AI Crawl Control fits
Your sites are on Cloudflare and you want to inspect and control crawler traffic from the same console.
When SearchSeal fits
You run sites on more than one host, or you want the evidence itself: per-page crawler history with labeled coverage, available over API and MCP.