There is a subtle yet significant shift taking place with regard to how the internet deals with bots. The latest protocol in this regard is PACT, Private Access Control Tokens, developed by Cloudflare. It will be implemented by Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Shopify. It is a straightforward idea, allowing legitimate AI agents while rejecting malicious bots.
The reason why this is important is that there is a bot issue with the web, and it keeps on growing.
The Bot Problem Is Getting Worse
According to Cloudflare’s Radar data, automated bots have come to make up about 58% of all HTTP requests to web content. That means actual human visitors make up only about 42% of web traffic. Matthew Prince, CEO at Cloudflare, mentioned this trend early in June. As he put it, the web gets browsed by artificial intelligence-powered bots like ChatGPT and Gemini more frequently now.
And the thing is that techniques that websites use to filter traffic are remnants of the past. Captchas, mandatory logging-in, browser fingerprinting, behavioral tracking – all those techniques presupposed that it would be people clicking on the links. And when it is AI agents doing the browsing, all these techniques become obstacles while remaining ineffective.
Cloudflare’s CTO Dane Knecht was straightforward about the problem. He said that as AI-powered traffic grows, the existing tools to manage it are too blunt and generic to keep up. PACT is designed to give everyone, whether human or agent, a smoother experience without sacrificing privacy.
What PACT Actually Does
At a high-level, PACT works by decoupling authentication of involvement of a human from revealing anything about this human. In very basic terms, the site that has an existing trusted relationship with a certain user can issue an anonymous token to this user’s browser. This token can then be used to prove the human involvement to other sites without revealing anything about this user and without enabling tracking by the receiving site.
According to Cloudflare, websites that have a good knowledge about “personhood” are referred to as issuers of such tokens. Specifically, platforms that users trust and interact with regularly, like their browsers or ecommerce stores, would issue these anonymous credentials.
The protocol works for both human and agent-based visits. Thus, it will not block all automated traffic; it will rather allow websites to discern between an AI agent shopping for a product and a bot scraping content or launching abuse campaigns.
Why Shopify Is Involved
The involvement of Shopify in the development of PACT makes perfect sense considering what kind of impact bots are having on online merchants.
Speaking in this context, Ilya Grigorik, Distinguished Engineer at Shopify, who previously managed Chrome User Experience Report at Google, was quite frank: “In commerce, every additional challenge and false positive is an abandoned cart. Merchants need real protection from abuse, but real shoppers shouldn’t have to deal with extra hoops or invasive tracking to check out”. This is precisely what PACT aims to address.
Grigorik stated that Shopify is participating to assist the millions of businesses on its platform distinguish between legitimate shoppers and authorized AI agents on one hand and abusive traffic on the other hand, all without compromising buyer privacy.
Where Cloudflare Fits In
It must be clear from the outset what PACT is and what it is not. First and foremost, it is not a Cloudflare product. Rather, it is a proposed open protocol that Cloudflare intends to submit for standardization.
This distinction is important since if the protocol is accepted broadly enough, it would govern the agentic web on a global scale, not just within Cloudflare’s infrastructure.
That said, Cloudflare is definitely not a neutral player here. It is already providing infrastructure to a significant part of the web. It hosts and manages AI agents via Cloudflare Agents framework, it routes traffic via Cloudflare Tunnels, and it runs AI Gateway via which different AI systems connect. And this company is not hiding its intentions either, saying that usage of PACT on Cloudflare’s network raises the bar for trustworthiness and integrity online without associated costs.
Questions That Still Need Answers
Nevertheless, a few issues remain unclear regarding the protocol. The most important is the question of how the issuer of personhood tokens will be determined. According to Cloudflare, sites with comprehensive knowledge of personhood will perform the issuance of tokens, but this criterion has not been explained in detail.
If the ability to issue trust tokens ends up concentrated among a few large platforms, it will definitely raise serious concerns about the issues of power and accountability. A genuinely open standard needs to work for sites that don’t run on Cloudflare and users who aren’t tied to any major platform.
Security Boulevard pointed out that in the official problem statement of the protocol, which is currently available to the public, no architecture has been described and no timelines for standardization or deployment have been set.
A Post-CAPTCHA Internet
One of the more noteworthy implications of PACT, in case it is adopted, may be the fact that eventually it will get rid of CAPTCHAs on the web. It may seem insignificant, but in fact, it reflects a rather substantial philosophical shift in the approach to the issue of verification.
CAPTCHAs and mandatory logins were built on the assumption that the web was for humans, and bots were mostly unwanted. That assumption no longer holds. Artificial intelligence agents, acting on behalf of users, are now expected participants in browsing activities including e-commerce, research, booking tickets, etc. PACT protocol is developed specifically for this new world in which the question of presence of bots on the web does not matter anymore, as far as bots have legitimate reasons for that.
What Comes Next
PACT is not currently live, and there are no announced dates for its deployment. Cloudflare and their partners plan to develop the protocol further and submit it for standardization. It is a very promising signal that Chrome, Edge, and Firefox are participating in developing this protocol.
For website owners, marketers and everyone dealing with e-commerce, it will be interesting to follow this project, because the mechanism of websites’ verification of users and their agents will soon be changed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q 1: What is Cloudflare’s PACT protocol?
PACT stands for Private Access Control Tokens. It is a protocol that is suggested by Cloudflare, which will allow websites to confirm that a legitimate human is behind an agent that acts on the human’s behalf, and which will not trace or identify this human.
Q 2: Who is supporting the development of PACT?
Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Shopify have signed as participants in the development of PACT, along with Cloudflare. Cloudflare plans to submit this protocol for standardization.
Q 3: Why is PACT needed right now?
According to the statistics provided by Cloudflare’s Radar, nowadays the portion of automated systems among all web requests reaches around 58 percent. As AI agents perform more and more browsing on behalf of users, old tools such as CAPTCHA and login wall create friction for legitimate actions and fail to prevent bad actors.
Q 4: How does PACT work technically?
A trusted site, which has already established a relationship with a human user, is able to issue an anonymous token for this user’s browser. This token can be used for authentication of a real human on other sites.
Q 5: Is PACT a Cloudflare product?
No, PACT is a proposed open protocol, not a Cloudflare product. Nevertheless, Cloudflare’s infrastructure is crucial in the practical implementation of this protocol.
Q 6: Why is Shopify involved in PACT?
Shopify participates in the creation of PACT due to the fact that bot abuses hurt merchants’ interests. False checkouts, scrapers and unnecessary CAPTCHA cause merchants’ losses. PACT is aimed to help merchants to differentiate real customers from bad traffic without creating additional friction for them.
Q 7: Will PACT block all AI bots?
No, it is not the aim of the protocol. It is aimed to distinguish authorized agents, which act on behalf of real users, from scrapers and bots, performing abuse. Legitimate AI activity will be allowed.
Q 8: When will PACT be available?
There are no announced dates for the deployment of PACT. Cloudflare and its partners plan to develop the protocol further and submit it for standardization, but there is no date of deployment announced.
