[formrecap]

This resonates. I run sites behind Cloudflare and the cache hit ratio drop from bot traffic is noticeable. The two-tier approach makes sense — human traffic is latency-sensitive and follows power-law access patterns, bot traffic is throughput-sensitive and sequential.

The interesting question is whether tiered caching also changes how you think about cache-control headers as a site operator. Right now I set s-maxage assuming mixed human+bot traffic. If Cloudflare handles the separation at the infrastructure level, operators could tune for human patterns without worrying about bots thrashing the edge cache.