I kind of do the same, not every time, but sometimes if I keep getting it on the same site, I seriously question how accurate their stats are without deep diving them more.
switching to tmobile home internet has been eye opening to me on how different the internet can be from person to person. you don't even get your own ipv4 address. makes me realize the challenge behind blocking something like yt-dlp
Yeah, I've seriously considered finding or building a CF-protected-detector browser extension to flag domains. Having one company MITMing so much traffic is straightforwardly dangerous, and not just an annoyance. We need competition.
It's kind-of a requirement in 2026 -- you need something to MTM the amount of bot traffic that's going around these days and CF provides a good product and service (even outside of just the challenges portion.)
If you want to be mad at somebody, then it should be at the AI companies for basically forcing the rest of the internet to use them. They have broken every non-enforceable contract that it was built upon. We went nearly 25 years without needing something a MTM solution like that, and I would say, in the last 5 or so, it has become a hard requirement
I want to visibly indicate it on links / visits, for myself, so I can learn what the impact is and what might be worth avoiding. And how tightly bound use of it is - often these kinds of services are used/avoided by pockets that are somewhat closed (spam networks, indie webrings, etc), and I'd like to get a feel for where those pockets might be.
I assume there's some way to detect that mechanically, which is probably what you described. I just haven't yet seen anything that does this - hopefully it already exists, if not I should probably make it.
There are domain zone files, and they sometimes contain NS records. Cloudflare hosted domains are easy to identify via their NS records, which also makes Cloudflare customers an ideal target for phishing.
