Whitelist Shareaholic Bot in Cloudflare (WAF Custom Rule)

Shareaholic’s bot (aka Steve Bot) fetches your page HTML to generate/link-preview metadata like titles, thumbnails, and excerpts for sharing and content discovery. If Cloudflare blocks or challenges it, Shareaholic features may degrade.

This guide shows how to whitelist Steve Bot using a Cloudflare WAF Custom Rule with the Skip action.

Step-by-step (Cloudflare Dashboard)

1. In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to Security rules > Create rule > Custom rule.
2. Name your rule: Set a descriptive name, e.g. “Shareaholic”.

3. Add the matching conditions: In When incoming requests match…

   Condition	Field	Operator	Value
   Condition 1	User Agent	equals	Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Shareaholic/1.0; +http://www.shareaholic.com/steve)
   OR
   Condition 2	IP Source Address	equals	54.208.16.197

   Logic: Allow requests that match Condition 1 OR Condition 2.

   Your expression preview should look like:

   (http.user_agent eq "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Shareaholic/1.0; +http://www.shareaholic.com/steve)") 
   or (ip.src eq 54.208.16.197)

4. Choose the action: “Skip”
5. Choose to skip all WAF components (check all options displayed)
6. Set Place at: First (top priority), so it runs before stricter rules. This mirrors Cloudflare’s general guidance that custom rules are used to control traffic handling order.
7. Click Save.

If you still see blocks/challenges, double-check: 

1. you used OR (not AND) between User-Agent and IP 
2. the User-Agent string matches exactly
3. the rule is ordered above more aggressive rules