Defend your ad spend and your rankings.One edge layer that filters the bots draining both, before they reach your site.

Both, because the same automated traffic attacks both. A managed filtering layer sits across Cloudflare’s network in front of your whole site, so every request passes through it: the bot clicks arriving from your paid ads and the scrapers and abusive crawlers hitting your organic pages. On the ad side, bot clicks are refused before they load your page, so they cannot pollute your conversion data or train your bidding on junk. On the organic side, scrapers are refused while the good crawlers, like Googlebot and GPTBot, are allowed through, protecting your content and crawl budget. One layer defends both surfaces because it is watching the one place both problems arrive: your site.

No, and no post-click tool actually does. The charge for a click happens in the ad platform’s auction the moment the click occurs, not on your website, so once a click is billed it is billed. What edge protection does is refuse the bot at your door before it loads the page, so it cannot pollute your conversion data, skew your bidding signals, or consume your server, and it does this for clicks from every platform rather than one ad account at a time. The honest benefit is that the automated traffic your ads attract is filtered before it does damage on your site, and the same layer protects your rankings at the same time, not a promise of refunds.

It runs on top of Cloudflare, not instead of it. Cloudflare’s free tier is a strong baseline, unmetered DDoS mitigation, a global network, free TLS, and a basic bot mode, and you keep all of it. The gap is configuration: the free plan gives you a handful of custom rules, a bot mode you cannot scope, and no bot score to make nuanced allow-or-refuse decisions, so turning it into targeted protection for your ad and ranking traffic is work it leaves to you. Edge protection adds the configured, maintained filtering, scraper signatures, datacenter and Tor ranges, honeypots, behavioral signals, and a crawler allowlist so good bots pass, on top of the free-tier foundation, and it is refreshed for you rather than hand-tuned against a rule limit.

Edge protection is $39/mo, added on top of your existing RankShield plan and billed monthly through Stripe. You can cancel anytime. Your origin protection keeps running the whole time, so the edge layer is an upgrade, not a replacement, and cancelling the add-on never leaves your site unprotected. For a business investing in both paid ads and organic rankings, one layer that defends both is usually simpler and cheaper than stacking a paid-search click-fraud tool plus hand-tuning a firewall for the organic side.

Setup is fully managed, and there is one step on your end. You check out with Stripe and enter your website; RankShield routes your site through Cloudflare for you. In most cases all you do is add a single DNS record that we provide, so you do not touch any servers, change your hosting, or alter your ad accounts. Your existing plugin protection keeps running throughout the change, your site stays up, and legitimate visitors and good crawlers are unaffected. Edge protection goes live once the edge is active.

They run together and defend different ground. The RankShield plugin protects the origin, scoring and challenging attacks as they hit your site, and it is included in your plan. Edge protection adds a filtering layer across Cloudflare’s network in front of that, refusing the automated traffic wasting your ad spend and attacking your rankings before it ever reaches your origin, and absorbing volumetric floods your server was never sized for. If your site is not being targeted and you run no ads, the plugin alone may be all you need. If you invest in both paid and organic and want the bots filtered before they land, the edge is the layer that covers both.