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.
How SearchSeal and Cloudflare AI Crawl Control differ
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
- Pageviews, privacy-safe daily visitors and sessions, and acquisition sources
- Human referrals from AI products, goals, conversion rates and same-day attributed revenue
- Real requests from AI crawlers, including requested paths and HTTP outcomes
- Observed evidence with explicit limits: crawler unknown is never rendered as zero
Side by side
| Decision factor | Cloudflare AI Crawl Control | SearchSeal |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Inside the Cloudflare dashboard, per zone | One dashboard across Cloudflare and non-Cloudflare hosts |
| Requires Cloudflare | Yes | No. Any host that can send access logs over HTTPS |
| Enforcement | Allow or block crawlers, with Cloudflare WAF controls | None. SearchSeal observes and reports, your host enforces |
| Fix workflow | Act through Cloudflare controls and WAF | 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.
Many teams run both. They answer different questions.
See all comparisonsSee how AI answers talk about your brand
Inspect saved answers, brand mentions, competitors and citation sources.
SearchSeal is in private beta. Public plans and pricing will follow.