Now that we know AI bots will ignore robots.txt and churn residential IP addresses to scrape websites, does anyone know of a method to block them that doesn’t entail handing over your website to Cloudflare?
Now that we know AI bots will ignore robots.txt and churn residential IP addresses to scrape websites, does anyone know of a method to block them that doesn’t entail handing over your website to Cloudflare?
Thank you for the detailed response. It’s disheartening to consider the traffic is coming from ‘real’ browsers/IPs, but that actually makes a lot of sense.
I’m coming at this from the angle of AI bots ingesting a website over and over to obsessively look for new content.
My understanding is there are two reasons to try blocking this: to protect bandwidth from aggressive crawling, or to protect the page contents from AI ingestion. I think the former is doable, and the latter is an unwinnable task. My personal reason is because I’m an AI curmudgeon, I’d rather spend CPU resources blocking bots than serving any content to them.