Web Bot Auth
A tamper-proof ID badge for bots, instead of a name tag anyone could write.
Reality check
In production. A draft, but a real one.
How it works
Today websites identify bots by a label (the "user agent") that anyone can fake, or by IP address, which breaks easily. With Web Bot Auth, the company running the bot publishes a public key at a well-known address and signs every request with the matching private key, using an existing IETF standard for signing web requests (RFC 9421).
The website, or its CDN such as Cloudflare, checks the signature and knows for certain "this really is OpenAI's agent" before deciding to let it in, block it or charge it. A news site can let a verified shopping agent through while stopping an anonymous scraper wearing the same label.
It answers which agent is visiting, not whom it represents; that's Poppy's and OAuth's job.
Who's behind it
Cloudflare proposed it in May 2025. On September 1, 2026 the IETF's webbotauth working group adopted it as an official working-group draft, written by authors from Cloudflare and Google; it's the group's only adopted document. It's still a draft, not an RFC: adoption isn't approval.
Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol and Mastercard's Agent Pay build on it, adding a tag that says whether the agent is browsing or buying, and observers report OpenAI, Cloudflare and DuckDuckGo signing requests today. The next revision is expected to change how the key directory is referenced, so early implementations may need updates.