Use case · Cloudflare & technical SEO
Search visibility. Security intact.
Improving the foundations for Google and Bing discovery while maintaining Cloudflare security. Practical work across Next.js, Astro, crawling and measurement.
Travel & aviation Anonymised experience Audit, implementation & validation
The challenge
Be discoverable.
Stay protected.
Search visibility depends on more than good content. Cloudflare sits between visitors, search crawlers and the website itself. Its security and delivery configuration helps determine who can reach public pages, what they receive and whether they encounter a challenge.
Across travel product work, the challenge was to understand how Cloudflare controls interacted with Google and Bing crawling, site migrations and commercial journeys. Public pages needed to remain accessible, while unwanted scraping and malicious requests still needed to be addressed.
The work covered Next.js applications and the migration of content pages to static HTML with Astro, delivered through Cloudflare. Checks followed the rendered content, URLs, language signals and analytics across both stacks, including periods when the site used a mixture of the two.
Ross has also helped an airline improve its technical SEO while maintaining security protections. That experience informs this approach to connecting search performance with the practical requirements of a commercial website.
This case study brings together lessons from travel product investigations and airline experience. Client and project identities remain confidential. The named technologies and detailed findings describe the travel product work.
The approach
Find the friction.
Refine the controls.
Start with the evidence, make focused changes, then check both search access and the customer journey.
Establish what is actually happening.
Compare Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools with Cloudflare rules, crawler responses and PostHog analytics. A fall in recorded pageviews can reflect filtered automation; it needs investigation before it is treated as lost customers.
Make Cloudflare protection more precise.
Review firewall rules, bot controls and challenges affecting public pages and sensitive journeys. Narrow overly broad challenge rules and exempt verified search crawlers from the relevant custom rules, while retaining targeted controls against scraping and exploit attempts. Each security layer needs its own checks.
Repair the route to useful content.
Check the HTML served by Next.js and Astro alongside robots.txt, XML sitemaps, redirects, canonical URLs and hreflang. Resolve broken routes and validate language signals so Google and Bing can reach the intended version of each page.
Validate the commercial journey.
Check real browser behaviour, PostHog events and onward booking links after changes. Compare Google and Bing search clicks with crawl health and conversions, using staged releases and a clear rollback path.
Crawler identity needs verification. A Googlebot or Bingbot user-agent alone does not establish that a request came from Google or Bing.
What improved
A stronger foundation for organic growth.
The work improved technical SEO readiness and the precision of access controls, while preserving targeted security protections.
More precise protection
Broad Cloudflare challenge rules were narrowed in the travel product work. Verified-bot exceptions and targeted anti-abuse controls remained in the configurations reviewed.
Stronger technical SEO
Broken public routes were corrected, and checks confirmed accessible pages, sitemaps and appropriate indexing signals on sampled URLs. This improved the technical conditions for discovery.
A clearer basis for growth
Comparing Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and PostHog separated filtered automation, crawl access, indexing and conversions. The analysis also identified measurement gaps after migration, giving subsequent growth work a clearer set of priorities.
A successful crawl does not guarantee Google or Bing indexing. Rankings and revenue require separate measurement; no percentage uplift is attributed to this work.
A potential collaboration
Bring growth and security together.
A useful starting point for airlines, travel businesses and content-led platforms using Cloudflare, investigating Google or Bing visibility, or planning a Next.js or Astro migration.
We can work with your marketing, engineering and security teams to audit the current setup, agree priorities and implement a focused set of improvements.
- A crawl-access and technical SEO assessment.
- A prioritised plan covering security rules, content delivery and measurement.
- Implementation support, release checks and a monitoring handover.