Akamai Integration

Redirect AI bot traffic from your Akamai-powered site to your xpay portal using Edge Redirector (Cloudlets).

This guide is under development. Check back soon for detailed step-by-step instructions.

Architecture


AI bot → your-site.com → Akamai edge detects bot User-Agent
   → 302 redirect to xpay.your-site.com (same path preserved)
   → xpay portal: auth check → content or 402

Human visitor → your-site.com → passes through normally
Search engine → your-site.com → passes through normally

Approach

Akamai uses Edge Redirector (part of Cloudlets) for conditional redirects based on request headers.

Steps Overview

Create an Edge Redirector Policy in Akamai Control Center
Configure matching rule on the User-Agent header using the AI bot list with “is one of” operator (case-insensitive)
Set redirect URL to https://xpay.your-site.com/\2 where \2 preserves the original request path
Activate in staging first, then production

Bot list

The same 22 AI bot User-Agents used across all CDN integrations — see the full bot list in the Cloudflare guide.

Search engines excluded

Googlebot, BingBot, Applebot (search), YandexBot, and DuckDuckBot are never redirected.

Prerequisites

Your xpay portal is live at xpay.your-domain.com
CNAME record added and verified
Akamai property configured with Cloudlets enabled

Testing


# Should redirect (302):
curl -A "GPTBot/1.0" -I https://your-site.com/some-article
 
# Should NOT redirect (200):
curl -A "Googlebot/2.1" -I https://your-site.com/some-article

Always test in Akamai’s staging environment first. Edge Redirector rules intercept live traffic — verify behavior before activating in production.