Rules and managed groups

Labels in, actions out: how AgentGate's WAF-style rules turn signals into allow, challenge, block, drop or count.

AgentGate decides like a web application firewall. Every request it evaluates goes through two stages.

1. Signals become labels

Signal sources look at the request and attach labels and scores:

Example label	Means
`agentgate:proof:missing`	no proof of work was sent
`agentgate:signal:machine_cadence`	typing rhythm looks machine-generated
`agentgate:env:webdriver`	the browser reports `navigator.webdriver`
`agentgate:tls:non_browser`	the TLS fingerprint is not a browser's
`agentgate:rate:ip_soft_exceeded`	the address is over its soft rate budget
`agentgate:agent:verified:chatgpt`	a valid Web Bot Auth signature from ChatGPT
`agentgate:ip:cloud:aws`	the address is in AWS's published ranges
`agentgate:sdk:late_init`	the page called `execute()` without `init()`

Scores include content, bot_risk and ip_reputation.

2. Rules pick an action

An ordered rule set matches on labels, label prefixes, score thresholds and the request itself (IP sets, country, ASN, cloud, Tor, headers, query, path, method, JA4 fingerprint, verified agent), combined with and / or / not. Rules can be rate-based and limited to routes.

Action	Effect
`allow`	admit
`challenge`	ask for the step-up check (or a new token, at the gateway)
`block`	refuse, optionally with a custom response
`drop`	answer like an acceptance, deliver nothing
`count`	add the label `agentgate:rule:<name>` and continue

The first matching rule whose action is not count decides; with no match the rule set's default_action applies.

JSON

{"name": "form_flood", "action": "block", "routes": ["/submit"],
 "rate": {"limit": 20, "window_seconds": 60, "keys": ["ip_prefix24"]},
 "response": {"status": 429, "retry_after": 60, "body": {"error": "rate_limited"}}}

Managed rule groups

You rarely write rules from scratch. Managed groups are versioned, published rule sets you reference by name and version:

agentgate-core@1: the built-in browser-check rules, including per-agent policy;
agentgate-agents@1: Web Bot Auth policy for the agent API;
agentgate-gateway@1: gateway authorization (signatures, rate budgets, tokens, required browser evidence);
agentgate-bot-control@1: user-agent and crawler IP checks;
agentgate-anonymity@1: Tor, datacenter and IP reputation.

The default rule set is agentgate-core@1, agentgate-agents@1 and agentgate-gateway@1, in that order. Published versions never change, so an upgrade is an explicit edit, and overrides can switch single rules to count while you measure them.

Where to go next

The full language: Rule language
Every group and its rules: Managed rule groups
IP data behind country, asn, cloud, tor and crawler checks: Threat intelligence