Source: blog.cloudflare.com/private-origins-public-to-private
Customers point a proxied A or AAAA record at a private IP, and Cloudflare reaches the origin over an existing Cloudflare One connection. Supported services include WAF and managed rules, bot management, rate limiting, caching, transform and rewrite rules, and Workers. Argo Smart Routing and Dedicated CDN Egress IPs are not supported, and origin health checks require Load Balancing.
Private routing turns on automatically for RFC 1918 IPv4 addresses, RFC 6598 CGNAT addresses and RFC 4193 IPv6 unique local addresses, and it cannot be disabled for those ranges. Other public IPs that are reachable only through a private network can use the setting manually. Through the API, private routing is an attribute on a standard DNS record.
Setup requires the Private Origins entitlement, which customers request from their account team, along with Cloudflare One connectivity and Unified Routing unless the connection uses Cloudflare Tunnel. Over Cloudflare WAN or Cloudflare Mesh, a return route must be configured for Cloudflare's source ranges, and Cloudflare says a missing route was the most common beta setup failure.
Why it matters if you build agents
Agent backends, MCP servers and internal APIs can be placed behind WAF, rate limiting and bot management without a public IP or an opened firewall port.
If requests time out with nothing reaching the origin, check the return route for Cloudflare's source range first, since that was the most common setup problem in the beta.
Private-to-private traffic is not yet covered; Cloudflare says a closed beta for it is targeted for early 2027.
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