Developing
DeepSeek did not state its user agent or robots.txt handling; Cloudflare did not state the number of bands or thresholds.
In 60 seconds
- DeepSeek's Search and Fetch APIs opened to all developers on October 17; billing at $0.75 per 1,000 successful calls starts 16:00 UTC on October 31, with failures not billed.
- Comparisons: Microsoft's Grounding with Bing at $35 per 1,000, Brave at $5 and Cloudflare's resold tiers at $0.25 to $7.
- Cloudflare's October 16 post says verified bots will be monitored for robots.txt compliance and whether they slow down after HTTP 429; results will feed "trust bands" on Radar.
- Rate limit is five requests per second per account, per endpoint; DeepSeek's authority scores run from 0 to 4, with -1 for unknown.
Impact Layer
- What changed
- Another low-priced web search API for AI developers arrives, while Cloudflare moves to grade bots on behaviour.
- Why it matters
- Cheap search for agents increases automated requests to sites, and conduct scores may decide which bots sites allow.
- Who is affected
- Site owners, SEO and GEO specialists and AI developers.
- Martech stack area
- AI, SEO & Search
- Stack impact
- Check your robots.txt and rate-limiting for AI crawlers and look for the Radar trust bands once published.
- Business impact
- Moderate Reported by PPC Land. DeepSeek's user agent, robots.txt handling, authority score method, any free tier and the basis for its "hundreds of millions" daily requests claim are not stated, and the X post, guide and reference page differ on details.
- Related technologies
- What to watch
- Cloudflare's trust band details and DeepSeek's crawler disclosure.
PPC Land’s Luis Rijo reported on October 18, 2026 on two items that bear on how AI systems fetch web content.
DeepSeek’s web search pricing
- Search and Fetch APIs opened to all developers on October 17.
- $0.75 per 1,000 successful calls, with billing starting 16:00 UTC on October 31, 2026. “Failed requests, empty search results, and timeouts are not billed.”
- Comparisons: Microsoft’s Grounding with Bing at $35 per 1,000; Brave at $5; Cloudflare’s resold tiers at $0.25 to $7.
- Rate limit of five requests per second per account, per endpoint.
Not stated: the user agent, robots.txt handling, how authority scores are calculated, any free tier and the source of the “hundreds of millions” daily requests claim.
Cloudflare’s bot trust scores
Announced in an October 16 post by Chris Tsoukaladelis. Verified bots are monitored after approval for robots.txt compliance and whether they slow down after HTTP 429 responses. Results will feed “trust bands” published on Radar, which customers may later use as thresholds. Verified bot program submissions have grown about sevenfold since 2023. Not stated: the number of bands, observation period, thresholds, whether bots can recover and Radar dates.
Our read
Conduct scoring gives site owners a data-based way to decide which AI bots to allow. DeepSeek’s missing crawler details are the first test.
Sources
- PPC Land: DeepSeek sets a $0.75 web search price as Cloudflare grades bots on conduct (opens in a new tab)
Source for the pricing, Cloudflare's announcement and what is not stated.