Introducing Edge Proxy — and What It's Building Toward
We've been building toward something bigger than a redirect manager, and today's release is the most visible step yet.
Edge Proxy
Starting today, you can enable Edge Proxy on any domain. When you do, your domain routes through our edge network — running on Cloudflare's global infrastructure — and we proxy all traffic to your origin server on your behalf.
Your visitors never notice. URLs stay the same. Responses come from your origin exactly as they would have before. The difference is that your traffic now passes through a layer you control, where redirect rules apply first.
If a redirect rule matches an incoming request, it fires — same as always. If no rule matches, the request is forwarded transparently to your origin and the response is returned unchanged. The two behaviors work together on the same domain without any coordination on your part.
The reason we built this on Cloudflare is simple: your visitors already benefit from one of the fastest edge networks on the planet. We're not asking you to trade performance for manageability. You get both.
Edge Redirects
Redirect rules have always run at the edge, and that hasn't changed. Whether or not you use Edge Proxy, every redirect you configure fires at Cloudflare's edge — typically in under 20ms, from a location close to your visitor. Edge Proxy adds the transparent passthrough layer on top of that foundation.
www and apex: one domain, one billing slot
A small but meaningful change: if you manage both example.com and www.example.com, they now appear grouped together in your dashboard. They count as a single domain on your plan.
We heard from a number of customers who found it frustrating to manage the apex and www variant as separate entries — two settings pages, two billing slots, two places to look when something isn't working. If you're running redirects on both, they belong together. Now they are.
What we're building toward: auto-healing redirects
Edge Proxy is not just a feature on its own. It's the first of three pieces we need before we can ship auto-healing redirects.
The idea behind auto-healing is straightforward: when a URL on your site breaks — returns a 404, gets moved without a redirect, or starts redirecting through a chain — we detect it and fix it automatically without you having to file a ticket or notice it yourself.
To do that, we need three things:
1. Edge Proxy — so we can observe every request to your origin in real time and see which ones come back broken. ✓ Done.
2. Broken link detection — the system that processes the signal from broken requests, validates them, and determines whether they're real problems worth fixing. In progress.
3. The auto-heal algorithm — the logic that decides what the correct redirect should be, creates the rule, and either applies it automatically or queues it for your review depending on your confidence threshold. Designed, not yet built.
We wanted to get Edge Proxy in your hands now rather than wait until all three pieces were ready. It's useful on its own, and the data it starts collecting as soon as you enable it will feed directly into auto-healing when that ships.
Enabling Edge Proxy
Edge Proxy is available on all plans. To enable it, open any domain in your dashboard and go to the Proxy tab. You'll set your origin URL — the server your domain currently points to — and toggle proxy mode on. The change propagates to the edge within a few seconds.
If you run into anything unexpected or have questions about how it interacts with your setup, reach out. We're watching this one closely as it rolls out.