I agree with several posters here who say to use Cloudflare to solve this problem. A combination of their "bot fight" mode and a simple rate limit would solve this problem. There are, of course, lots of ways to fight this problem, but I tend to prefer a 3-minute implementation that requires no maintenance. Using a free Cloudflare account comes with a lot of other benefits. A basic paid account brings even more features and more granular controls.

If you want to make a bag, sell it to some fool who is impressed by the large traffic numbers. Include a free course on digital marketing if you really want to zhuzh it up! Easier than taking money from YC for your next failed startup!

Put some sort of grammatically-incorrect text on each page, so it fucks with the weights of whatever they are training.

Alternatively, sell text space to advertisers as LLM SEO

so it's a honeypot except they get stuck on the rainbow and never get to the pot of gold

Wait, how are bots crawling the sub-pages? Do you automatically generate "links to" other colours' "pages" or something?

Wait, how are bots crawling these “sub-pages”? Do you have URL links to them?

How important is having the hex color in the URL? How about using URL params, or doing the conversion in JavaScript UI on a single page, i.e. not putting the color in the URL? Despite all the fun devious suggestions for fortifying your website, not having colors in the URL would completely solve the problem and be way easier.

Collect the User Agent strings. Publish your findings.

Most bots are prob just following the links inside the page.

You could try serving back html with no links (as in no a-href), and render links in js or some other clever way that works in browsers/for humans.

You won’t get rid of all bots, but it should significantly reduce useless traffic.

Alternative just make a static page that renders the content in js instead of php and put it on github pages or any other free server.

How about the alpha value?

I think I would use it to design a bot attractant. Create some links with random text use a genetic algorithm to refine those words based on how many bots click on them. It might be interesting to see what they fixate on.