Cloudflare shipped two things eight days apart in August 2026, and almost every write-up treated them as separate product news. Bot Preference Sync landed on August 21 and generates your robots.txt from your dashboard settings. BotBase for Operators landed on August 28 and gives bot operators a managed process for getting into Cloudflare's directory of known bots. Put them side by side and they are one thing.

Google published an update to the site reputation policy on Friday, August 28, 2026, credited to the Search Quality team. As of August 30, a manual action under the site reputation policy no longer affects rankings for anyone searching from inside the European Economic Area. Outside the EEA it works exactly as it did: the offending section is demoted, and the rest of the site is left alone.