When a patient types "NaProTechnology doctor near me" into Perplexity, or asks ChatGPT "who treats recurrent miscarriage without IVF," the AI generates an answer by reading pages Google has already ranked highly for that topic. If your site is one of those pages, you can appear in the answer. If your site has Bot Fight Mode on, those AI systems hit a wall every time they try to read it -- and you never appear.
The site looks fine to you. You can browse every page. It loads fast. Nothing seems wrong. The problem is entirely invisible from the front end -- it only shows up when an AI crawler tries to access your content, and your server quietly turns it away.
Who designed this and why it doesn't apply to your practice
Bot Fight Mode was built for companies that get hammered by automated traffic: ticketing platforms, retail sites, financial services. Thousands of bots hitting their servers every minute trying to scrape prices, bulk-buy inventory, or test stolen passwords. For those companies, blocking unrecognized automated traffic has real value.
Your 50-page NaProTechnology practice site doesn't face those threats. But Bot Fight Mode doesn't know that. It treats the ChatGPT search crawler, the Perplexity crawler, Bing's crawler, and Google's AI Overview crawler the same way it treats a credential-stuffing bot. All of them get blocked. The result: Bing has no record of your site. AI systems can't access your current content. And SEO tools that check your site's authority can't read it either, so your scores look worse than they are.
The part worth knowing about AI training bots
There's a legitimate concern underneath all of this: some AI companies send crawlers specifically to harvest clinical content for training their models, not to answer patient queries. You may not want your writing about endometriosis or the Creighton Model used to train a language model without your consent.
The correct tool for that concern is your site's robots.txt file -- a short text file that tells specific crawlers what they can and cannot access. You can use it to allow the crawlers that cite you in answers while blocking the ones that scrape you for training. Bot Fight Mode can't make this distinction. It's all or nothing.
How to fix it
In your Cloudflare account: Security, then Bots, then turn off Bot Fight Mode. That's the entire change. After that, ask whoever manages your site to set up a robots.txt that explicitly allows AI search crawlers. Then submit your site to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to prompt a fresh read of your pages. The effects of having it blocked can take a few weeks to fully clear -- which is one more reason not to leave it running.
Frequently asked questions
What is Cloudflare Bot Fight Mode?
Bot Fight Mode is a Cloudflare security feature that challenges or blocks automated traffic. It is designed to stop scrapers and bad bots, but it also intercepts the user-agent strings used by legitimate AI search crawlers, preventing them from indexing a site's content.
Which AI crawlers does Bot Fight Mode block?
The most commonly blocked crawlers are ChatGPT-User (OpenAI), Perplexity-User (Perplexity AI), and Claude-User (Anthropic). These crawlers retrieve live content to answer user queries, so blocking them removes the practice from AI-generated answers.
How do I check if my NaPro site is blocking AI crawlers?
Use curl from the command line with a spoofed user-agent string matching ChatGPT-User or Perplexity-User against your domain. A 403 response confirms the block. Cloudflare's Security Events log also shows challenged bot traffic by user-agent.
Does disabling Bot Fight Mode expose my site to real bots?
Disabling Bot Fight Mode for specific user-agents via a WAF exception is the precise fix. The rule can allowlist known AI crawlers by user-agent while leaving Bot Fight Mode active for all other automated traffic.