Cloudflare and GoDaddy announced a strategic partnership on April 17 to build the identity and access control infrastructure for AI agents on the open web. The partnership bundles three components: AI crawler management for GoDaddy’s 21 million+ small business customers, a website scoring tool at isitagentready.com, and joint support for open standards that give AI agents verifiable identities.

What Shipped

AI Crawl Control for GoDaddy customers. GoDaddy is integrating Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control directly into its website hosting platform, according to TechAfrica News. This gives website owners a permission-based model: allow, block, or signal that payment is required before AI crawlers can access their content.

isitagentready.com. Cloudflare launched a tool that scores any website on how well it supports AI agents, covering authentication guidance, content formatting, and payment readiness. “We think something similar should exist to help site owners adopt best practices for agents,” Cloudflare wrote on its blog, comparing it to Google Lighthouse for web performance.

Agent Readiness Radar dataset. Cloudflare added a new dataset to Cloudflare Radar tracking adoption of agent standards across the internet. The data, updated weekly, is accessible through the Radar API.

How Agent-Ready Is the Web Today?

Not very. Cloudflare scanned the 200,000 most-visited domains and found, according to its blog post:

  • 78% have a robots.txt, but most are written for traditional search crawlers, not AI agents
  • 4% have declared AI usage preferences via Content Signals
  • 3.9% serve markdown content on Accept: text/markdown requests
  • MCP Server Cards and API Catalogs (RFC 9727) appear on fewer than 15 sites in the entire dataset

The Agent Name System (ANS)

Both companies are backing GoDaddy’s Agent Name System, an open standard that uses DNS and public key infrastructure to give AI agents verifiable names and identities. ANS is designed to let website owners distinguish legitimate AI agents from unidentified or malicious impersonators.

Cloudflare supports ANS alongside its own Web Bot Auth standard, which uses cryptography to verify bot and agent traffic, and its Signature Agent Card for developers to share their agent’s identity and purpose, per TechAfrica News.

“The Internet is currently undergoing a fundamental shift, expanding from a web of pages designed for humans to a web that is also designed to support agents acting on behalf of humans,” the joint announcement stated.

The Standards Landscape

This announcement sits alongside other agent identity moves this week. OpenAI joined the FIDO Alliance for agent authentication standards. Sam Altman’s World released AgentKit for attaching proof-of-human credentials to agents, with an Okta partnership for agent delegation verification. Microsoft’s Foundry Toolkit shipped with MCP tool approval controls.

Cloudflare and GoDaddy’s contribution is distinct: rather than verifying the human behind the agent (World’s approach) or authenticating the agent at the model layer (FIDO’s approach), they are defining how the web itself recognizes, permits, and interacts with agent traffic. “The web has always had to adapt to new standards,” Cloudflare wrote. “It learned to speak to web browsers, and then it learned to speak to search engines. Now, it needs to speak to AI agents.”

For builders: check your own site at isitagentready.com. With fewer than 15 sites currently supporting MCP Server Cards or API Catalogs, early adoption is a straightforward differentiation play.