Cloudflare just announced an “AI Index” to give every customer clearer visibility into the AI traffic crossing their network. Translation: you’ll see where AI calls are going, how they perform, and where risk might creep in.
Source: Cloudflare — An AI Index for all our customers.
What is Cloudflare’s AI Index?
A network-level view of AI activity observed by Cloudflare, surfaced in your dashboard. Cloudflare’s AI Index provides insights like the volume of AI-related requests, destination providers, latency, error rates, and policy posture, so teams can benchmark usage and tighten governance.
Why it matters
- Visibility: Separate AI traffic from everything else to understand real adoption and exposure.
- Performance: Track latency and errors to route or cache smarter and improve user experience.
- Risk and governance: Spot unsanctioned AI usage and apply access, egress, or data policies.
How to use it this week
- Baseline: Record your current AI traffic share (% of total requests), top destinations, and p95 latency.
- Control: Create policies for which AI providers, regions, and models are allowed; block unknown endpoints.
- Optimize: Compare latency and reliability across providers; pilot multi-provider routing for critical paths.
- Cost hygiene: Use egress and request volume as proxies to forecast spend and set alerts for spikes.
- Incident ready: Tie anomalies (sudden AI traffic surges) to alerts in your SIEM and response runbooks, thanks to Cloudflare’s AI Index insights.
Key metrics to watch
- AI traffic share: Percent of total traffic that is AI-related, by app/team.
- Provider mix: Share of traffic by AI vendor and region; look for vendor concentration risk.
- Latency and errors: p50/p95/p99 latency, error codes/timeouts during peak vs. off-peak.
- Data movement: Egress patterns to external AI APIs; tag traffic touching sensitive datasets.
- Policy coverage: % of AI traffic governed by explicit policies vs. uncategorized.
Governance tips
- Map critical data flows: Classify which workloads may call AI and what data they send.
- Apply least privilege: Restrict AI endpoints by identity, device posture, and purpose.
- Vendor portability: Maintain at least one alternate provider path for resilience and negotiation.
- Audit and document: Align with the NIST AI Risk Management Framework for repeatable reviews, keeping in mind the insights from Cloudflare’s AI Index.
The takeaway
Cloudflare’s AI Index turns opaque AI traffic into actionable network intelligence. Utilize Cloudflare’s AI Index to baseline usage, lock down risky egress, and tune performance before costs and compliance issues spiral.
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