AWS CloudFront Integration

Redirect AI bot traffic from your CloudFront distribution to your xpay portal using WAF rules and CloudFront Functions.

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

Architecture


AI bot → your-site.com → CloudFront + WAF detects bot User-Agent
   → CloudFront Function redirects to xpay.your-site.com
   → xpay portal: auth check → content or 402

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

Approach

AWS uses a two-layer approach: WAF for bot detection and CloudFront Functions for the redirect.

Steps Overview

Create a Web ACL in AWS WAF & Shield (CloudFront scope)
Associate your CloudFront distribution with the Web ACL
Add a WAF rule that matches the 22 AI bot User-Agents — set action to “Allow” with a custom header x-amzn-waf-bot inserted
Create a CloudFront Function (viewer-request stage) that checks for the x-amzn-waf-bot header and returns a 302 redirect to xpay.your-domain.com

Why two layers?

CloudFront Functions alone can’t inspect request headers with complex matching. WAF handles the detection and tags the request. The CloudFront Function handles the lightweight redirect based on the tag.

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
CloudFront distribution configured for your domain

Alternative: ALB-based Setup

If you’re using an Application Load Balancer (ALB) instead of CloudFront, you can use ALB Listener Rules with User-Agent conditions to redirect bot traffic. This is simpler but only works for ALB-fronted origins.

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