Frenemy verifies and classifies bot and AI-agent traffic on your site or store, then lets you observe, dry-run, or block it. See pricing, features, and setup…
Frenemy is a traffic-intelligence tool that identifies, verifies, and acts on the automated visitors hitting a website or online store. Instead of trusting a bot's claimed identity, it checks it against known operator IP ranges and Web Bot Auth, then sorts traffic into three buckets: "friend" (search engines and citing AI assistants), "frenemy" (training scrapers and SEO tools), and "foe" (impostors and scrapers that ignore robots.txt). Each crawl also gets an impact score weighing bandwidth cost against referral value, so site owners can see which bots are worth allowing. Frenemy is deployed at the edge (Cloudflare Workers, a Vercel/Next.js integration, a WordPress plugin, or via Shopify's Cloudflare proxy) and is rolled out in stages: observation-only, a dry-run preview of proposed blocking rules, and eventually autonomous enforcement with guardrails. It is explicitly designed to "fail open" — if the service goes down, visitor traffic is unaffected, and verified search engines are never blocked by default.
Key Features
Bot Identity Verification — Checks each automated visitor against known operator IP ranges and Web Bot Auth instead of trusting a bot's claimed identity.
Friend / Frenemy / Foe Classification — Buckets automated traffic into three categories: search engines and citing AI assistants (friend), training scrapers and SEO tools (frenemy), and robots.txt-ignoring impostors (foe).
Traffic Impact Scoring — Assigns each crawl an impact score weighing bandwidth cost against referral value, so site owners can see which bots are worth allowing.
Progressive Control Modes — Rolls out in stages: observation-only, a dry-run preview of proposed blocking rules, and eventually autonomous enforcement with guardrails.
Multi-Platform Edge Deployment — Deploys via Cloudflare Workers, a Vercel/Next.js integration, a WordPress plugin, or Shopify's Cloudflare proxy.
Weekly Digest & Reporting — Sends a weekly email digest with impostor alerts and exportable cost/earn traffic receipts, plus 30-day or 12-month history depending on plan.
Pros & Cons
Pros
Classifies automated traffic into friend/frenemy/foe instead of a blunt allow-or-block list, so legitimate crawlers and citing AI assistants aren't caught in the same net as scrapers
Verifies bot identity against operator IP ranges and Web Bot Auth rather than trusting the claimed user agent
Staged rollout — observation only, then a dry-run preview, then enforcement — lets teams validate rules before they affect real traffic
Designed to fail open: verified search engines stay unblocked by default and the whole service can be disabled instantly if something goes wrong
Native install paths for Cloudflare, Next.js/Vercel, WordPress, and Shopify keep most setups under 5–20 minutes
Cons
No permanent free plan — only a 14-day free trial before billing starts, and pricing is charged per site
The top AUTOMATE tier (autonomous filtering) was still listed as "arriving in v0.4" at the time of review, so full hands-off automation wasn't yet generally available
Per-site pricing ($4.99–$49.99/mo each) can add up quickly for teams monitoring several properties
Company background (founding year, team size, headquarters) is not published, which may make due diligence harder for larger buyers