PetalBot is a website crawling bot of the Petal search engine. I have recently noticed in one of the news websites that I manage started getting a large number of requests from the bot. It kept getting worse, to the point that it started increasing the server load. So, I finally had to block the PetalBot using Cloudflare. Here is a step-by-step guide on how I did it.

Block PetalBot using Web Application firewall :

You can go to the WAF section under security and add the following firewall rule to block any User Agent which contains the name “PetalBot“. Please check the screenshot below to understand the firewall rule.

Cloudflare Firewall rule to block User Agent that contains, “PetalBot” or “petalsearch”