Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn) - Hacker News

Posted by misterchocolat 12/16/2025

Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)(github.com)

Alright so if you run a self-hosted blog, you've probably noticed AI companies scraping it for training data. And not just a little (RIP to your server bill).

There isn't much you can do about it without cloudflare. These companies ignore robots.txt, and you're competing with teams with more resources than you. It's you vs the MJs of programming, you're not going to win.

But there is a solution. Now I'm not going to say it's a great solution...but a solution is a solution. If your website contains content that will trigger their scraper's safeguards, it will get dropped from their data pipelines.

So here's what fuzzycanary does: it injects hundreds of invisible links to porn websites in your HTML. The links are hidden from users but present in the DOM so that scrapers can ingest them and say "nope we won't scrape there again in the future".

The problem with that approach is that it will absolutely nuke your website's SEO. So fuzzycanary also checks user agents and won't show the links to legitimate search engines, so Google and Bing won't see them.

One caveat: if you're using a static site generator it will bake the links into your HTML for everyone, including googlebot. Does anyone have a work-around for this that doesn't involve using a proxy?

Please try it out! Setup is one component or one import.

(And don't tell me it's a terrible idea because I already know it is)

package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@fuzzycanary/core gh: https://github.com/vivienhenz24/fuzzy-canary

373 points | 277 comments

kstrauser 12/18/2025|

I love the insanity of this idea. Not saying it's a good idea, but it's a very highly entertaining one, and I like that!

I've also had enormous luck with Anubis. AI scrapers found my personal Forgejo server and were hitting it on the order of 600K requests per day. After setting up Anubis, that dropped to about 100. Yes, some people are going to see an anime catgirl from time to time. Bummer. Reducing my fake traffic by a factor of 6,000 is worth it.

anonymous908213 12/18/2025||

As someone on the browsing end, I love Anubis. I've only seen it a couple of times, but it sparks joy. It's rather refreshing compared to Cloudfare, which will usually make me immediately close the page and not bother with whatever content was behind it.

teeray 12/19/2025|||

It really reminds me of old Internet, when things were allowed to be fun. Not this tepid corporate-approved landscape we have now.

GoblinSlayer 12/20/2025||

Anubis is simple; recaptcha and the like are huge opaque spaghetti.

kstrauser 12/18/2025||||

Same here, really. That's why I started using it. I'd seen it pop up for a moment on a few sites I'd visited, and it was so quirky and completely not disruptive that I didn't mind routing my legit users through it.

n1xis10t 12/19/2025||

So maybe there are more people who like the “anime catgirl” than there are who think it’s weird

kstrauser 12/19/2025||

*anime jackalgirl ;-)

Quite possibly. Or, in my case, I think it's more quirky and fun than weird. It's non-zero amounts of weird, sure, but far below my threshold of troublesome. I probably wouldn't put my business behind it. I'm A-OK with using it on personal and hobby projects.

Frankly, anyone so delicate that they freak out at the utterly anodyne imagery is someone I don't want to deal with in my personal time. I can only abide so much pearl clutching when I'm not getting paid for it.

D-Machine 12/19/2025|||

The Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the main organization unifying and handling all the main HPC compute clusters in Canada) now uses Anubis for their wiki. Granted this is not a business, but still!

https://docs.alliancecan.ca/wiki/Technical_documentation

Imustaskforhelp 12/19/2025|||

For what its worth, I think that a UN/(Unicef?) website (not sure which one) did use anubis so maybe you can put it behind businesses too :)

prmoustache 12/19/2025||||

Anyone is free to replace the cat girl with an actual cat or a vintage computer logo or whatnot anyway.

My issue is that it blocks away people using browsers without javascript.

stefanka 12/19/2025||

How can one do this? Did not find it in the docs

easton 12/19/2025|||

It’s a feature in the paid version, or I guess you could recompile it if you didn’t want to pay (but my guess is if you want to change the logo you can probably pay).

prmoustache 12/19/2025|||

The 3 images are in the repo, you can replace them and rebuild or point to other ones in the templates.

acheong08 12/19/2025||||

As someone on the hosting end, Anubis has unfortunately been overused and thus scrapers, especially Huawei ones, bypass it. I've gone for go-away instead which is similar but more configurable in challenges

PunchyHamster 12/19/2025||||

My experience with it is that it somehow took 20 seconds to load (site might've been hn-hugged at the time), only to "protect" some fucking static page instead of just serving that shit in the first place rather than wasting CPU on... whatever it was doing to cause delay

timpera 12/19/2025||

Same experience for me. I tried it on a low-end smartphone and the Anubis challenge took about 45 seconds to complete.

brettermeier 12/19/2025||||

Reminds me of weird furry porn, I can't say I like it

opem 12/19/2025||||

yes, very true! Anubis is a hell lot better than cloudflare turnstile or its older cousin sister google recaptcha.

m4rtink 12/19/2025|||

Yep, Anubis-chan is super cute! :)

n1xis10t 12/18/2025|||

That’s so many scrapers. There must be a ton of companies with very large document collections at this point, and it really sucks that they don’t at least do us the courtesy of indexing them and making them available for keyword search, but instead only do AI.

It’s kind of crazy how much scraping goes on and how little search engine development goes on. I guess search engines aren’t fashionable. Reminds me of this article about search engines disappearing mysteriously: https://archive.org/details/search-timeline

I try to share that article as much as possible, it’s interesting.

kstrauser 12/18/2025|||

So! Much! Scraping! They were downloading every commit multiple times, and fetching every file as seen at each of those commits, and trying to download archives of all the code, and hitting `/me/my-repo/blame` endpoints as their IP's first-ever request to my server, and other unlikely stuff.

My scraper dudes, it's a git repo. You can fetch the whole freaking thing if you wanna look at it. Of course, that would require work and context-aware processing on their end, and it's easier for them to shift the expense onto my little server and make me pay for their misbehavior.

n1xis10t 12/18/2025||

Crazy

PeterStuer 12/19/2025||||

Or some anti-ddos/bot companies using ultra cheap scraping services to annoy you enough to get you into their "free" anti bot protection, so they can charge the few real ai scrapers for access to your site.

throw10920 12/19/2025||

Is there any evidence that this has actually happened?

zhengyi13 12/19/2025||

Even if there isn't (yet?), there's probably someone who's honestly thinking this is potentially a viable business model and at least napkin-mathing it out.

kstrauser 12/19/2025|||

My napkin mathing is that their ROI would be negative. That's a lot of compute and bandwidth they'd have to pay for even if they were just throwing away the results.

throw10920 12/20/2025|||

So, it hasn't happened, and you're just making stuff up.

miki123211 12/19/2025||||

But there is a lot of search engine development going on, it's just that the results of the new search engines are fed straight into AI instead of displayed in the legacy 10-links-per-page view.

rurban 12/20/2025||||

Just block all the big hosters IP ranges, when they ignore robots.txt.

For fun add long timeouts and huge content sizes. No private individual will browse from there, and all scrapers will do.

mrweasel 12/19/2025|||

> There must be a ton of companies with very large document collections at this point

See, I don't think there is, I don't think they want that expense. It's basically the Linus Torvalds philosophy of data storage, if it's on the Internet, I don't need a backup. While I have absolutely no proof of this, I'd guess that many AI companies just crawl the Internet constantly, never saving any of the data. We're seeing some of these scrapers go to great length attempting to circumvent any and all forms of caching, they aren't interested in having a two week old copy of anything.

kelvinjps10 12/19/2025|||

Where did Linus Torvalds expressed this philosophy I have never seen it

lelanthran 12/19/2025||

> Where did Linus Torvalds expressed this philosophy I have never seen it

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/574706-only-wimps-use-tape-...

n1xis10t 12/19/2025|||

Could be. Can you train a model without saving things though?

buu700 12/19/2025|||

It's actually a well established concept: https://youtu.be/p9KeopXHcf8

n1xis10t 12/18/2025|||

*anime jackalgirl

Also you mentioned Anubis, so it’s creator will probably read this. Hi Xena!

xena 12/19/2025|||

Ohai! I'm working on dataset poisoning. The early prototype generates vapid LinkedIn posts but future versions will be fully pluggable with WebAssembly.

mrweasel 12/19/2025|||

Now I'm picturing an AI trained exclusively on LinkedIn posts. One could probably sell that model to an online ad agency for a pretty penny.

Yizahi 12/19/2025||

And thus AM was born. Woe to us.

tommica 12/19/2025||||

Hi Xena! Your blog is amazing! Didn't realize you're working on Anubis - it's a really nice tool for the internet! Reminds me a bit of the ye' olde internet for some reason.

gettingoverit 12/19/2025||||

You've made one of the best solutions, that matched what I thought of implementing myself, and at the time it was most needed. I think a couple of "thank you" are sorely missing in this comment section.

Thank you!

n1xis10t 12/19/2025|||

That sounds fun, I look forward to reading a writeup about that

xena 12/19/2025||

So I can plan it, how much detail do you want? Here's what I have about the prototype: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/honeypot/overview

n1xis10t 12/19/2025|||

Probably any detail that you think is cool, I would be interested in reading about. When in doubt err on the side of too much detail.

That was a good read. I hadn’t heard of spintax before, but I’ve thought of doing things like that. Also “pseudoprofound anti-content”, what a great term, that’s hilarious!

63stack 12/19/2025||||

This is amazing, I was just wondering about if it's possible to tie anubis together with iocaine, but it seems you already thought of that.

xena 12/19/2025||

It's slightly different in subtle ways. If I recall iocaine makes you configure a subprocess that it executes to generate garbage. One rule I have for Anubis in the code is that fork()/exec() are banned. So the pluggable garbage generator is gonna be powered by CGI handlers compiled to WebAssembly. It should be fun!

kstrauser 12/19/2025|||

As the owner of honeypot.net, I always appreciate seeing the name used as intended out in the wild.

ramonga 12/19/2025||||

what do people use to get keyword alerts in HN?

n1xis10t 12/19/2025||

I think that most people don't do this, and the ones that do have custom solutions. Xena's uses cron, but that's all I know. It's probably a custom shell script.

kstrauser 12/18/2025||||

Correct; my bad!

And hey, Xena! (And thank you very much!)

ziml77 12/18/2025||||

I checked Xe's profile when I hadn't seen them post here for a while. According to that, they're not really using HN anymore.

n1xis10t 12/18/2025||

See this thread from yesterday or so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46302496#46306025

GaryBluto 12/19/2025|||

[dead]

amypetrik8 12/19/2025|||

>I love the insanity of this idea. Not saying it's a good idea, but it's a very highly entertaining one, and I like that!

An even more insane idea -- minding the idea here is porn is radioactive to AI data training scrapers -- is there is something the powers that be view as far more disruptive and against community guidelineish than porn. And that would be wrongthink. The narratives. The historic narratives. The woke ideology. Anything related to an academic department whose field is <population subgroup> studies. Alls you need to do is plop in a little diatribe staunchly opposing any such enforced views and that AI bot will shoot away from your website and lightspeed

GoblinSlayer 12/20/2025|||

I'm afraid AI bot and scraper are different things. Looks like poison is filtered after scraping no matter where it comes from, so there's no need to disable scraping you, because that's extra work.

lelanthran 12/19/2025|||

I like this better than of NSFW links; just include a (possible LLM generated) paragraph about not supporting transitions in minor children. Or perhaps that libraries that remove instructional booklets for how to have same-sex intercourse aren't actually banning the books.

That sort of thing; nothing that 80% of people object to (so there's no problem if someone actually sees it), but something that definitely triggers the filters.

tonymet 12/19/2025||

[flagged]

kstrauser 12/19/2025||

Which cartoon are you referring to? The version of Anubis I installed only has the G-rated default images.

tonymet 12/19/2025||

[flagged]

kstrauser 12/19/2025|||

I'm being sincere here: I genuinely don't know what you're talking about.

I'm referring to these default images: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/tree/main/docs/static/im.... Do you mean something different?

tonymet 12/19/2025||

Similar but yeah. Whatever prompts during the challenge . It’s creepy , out of context and inappropriate .

n1xis10t 12/19/2025|||

If you keep referring to non-explicit material as pornography, you will continue to confuse people.

If you have an objection to the image other than it’s pornographic status, please word it clearly.

tonymet 12/19/2025||

I was clear on the issue

zackmorris 12/19/2025||

This is very hacker-like thinking, using tech's biases against it!

I can't help but feel like we're all doing it wrong against scraping. Cloudflare is not the answer, in fact, I think that they lost their geek cred when they added their "verify you are human" challenge screen to become the new gatekeeper of the internet. That must remain a permanent stain on their reputation until they make amends.

Are there any open source tools we could install that detect a high number of requests and send those IP addresses to a common pool somewhere? So that individuals wouldn't get tracked, but bots would? Then we could query the pool for the current request's IP address and throttle it down based on volume (not block it completely). Possibly at the server level with nginx or at whatever edge caching layer we use.

I know there may be scaling and privacy issues with this. Maybe it could use hashing or zero knowledge proofs somehow? I realize this is hopelessly naive. And no, I haven't looked up whether someone has done this. I just feel like there must be a bulletproof solution to this problem, with a very simple explanation as to how it works, or else we've missed something fundamental. Why all the hand waving?

dvfjsdhgfv 12/19/2025||

Your approach to GenAI scrapers is similar to our fight with email spam. The reason email spam got solved was because the industry was interested in solving it. But this issue got the industry split: without scraping, GenAI tools are less functional. And there is some serious money involved, so they will use whatever means necessary, technical and legal, to fight such initiatives.

conrs 12/20/2025|||

I've been exploring decentralized trust algorithms lately, and so reading this was nice. I've a similar intuition - for every advance in scraping detection, scrapers will learn too, and so it's an ongoing war of mutations, but no real victor.

The internet has seen success with social media content moderation and so it seems natural enough that an application could exist for web traffic itself. Hosts being able to "downvote" malicious traffic, and some sort of decay mechanism given IP's recycling. This exists in a basic sense with known TOR exit nodes and known AWS, GCP IP's, etc.

That said, we probably don't have the right building blocks yet, IP's are too ephemeral, yet anything more identity-bound is a little too authoritarian IMO. Further, querying something for every request is probably too heavy.

Fun to think about, though.

ATechGuy 12/19/2025|||

Scrapers use residential IP proxies, so blocking based on IP addresses is not a solution.

smegger001 12/19/2025|||

maybe some proof of work scheme to load page content with increasing difficulty based on ip address behavior profiling.

venturecruelty 12/21/2025||

Firewall.

montroser 12/18/2025||

This is a cute idea, but I wonder what is the sustainable solution to this emerging fundamental problem: As content publishers, we want our content to be accessible to everyone, and we're even willing to pay for server costs relative to our intended audience -- but a new outsized flood of scrapers was not part of the cost calculation, and that is messing up the plan.

It seems all options have major trade-offs. We can host on big social media and lose all that control and independence. We can pay for outsized infrastructure just to feed the scrapers, but the cost may actually be prohibitive, and seems such a waste to begin with. We can move as much as possible SSG and put it all behind cloudflare, but this comes with vendor lock in and just isn't architecturally feasible in many applications. We can do real "verified identities" for bots, and just let through the ones we know and like, but this only perpetuates corporate control and makes healthy upstart competition (like Kagi) much more difficult.

So, what are we to do?

hollowturtle 12/18/2025||

If the LLMs are the "new Google" one solution would be for them to pay you when scraping your content, so you both have an incentive, you're more willing to be scraped and they'll try to not abuse you because it will cost them at every visit. If your content is valuable and requested on prompts they will scrape you more and so on. I can't see other solutions honestly. For now they decided to go full evil and abuse everyone

jrm4 12/19/2025|||

No disrespect to op, but I'm baffled as to how people keep coming up with ideas like this as if they are viable.

Google is never ever ever ever going to "pay to scrape." I'm genuinely baffled as to how people think it would possibly come to this.

venturecruelty 12/21/2025|||

Well, "let Google do whatever the fuck they want because they're rich" isn't exactly working out, is it.

lowwave 12/19/2025|||

presearch does. Anyone had experience with them?

nkrisc 12/19/2025||||

The only way that would work is if they were legally required to. And even then, it probably wouldn’t work unless failure to comply was a criminal offense. You know what? Even then it still might not work.

vivzkestrel 12/19/2025||||

or turn your blog into a frontend/backend combo. keep the frontend as an SPA so that the page has nothing on it. have your backend send data in encrypted format and the AI scrapers would need to do a tonne of work in order to figure out what your data is. If everyone uses a different key and different encryption algorithm suddenly all their server time is busted decrypting stuff

chii 12/19/2025|||

How does your normal users get access to the same contents?

Or are you having the user solve an encryption puzzle to view it?

vivzkestrel 12/19/2025|||

- the frontend has a decryption module that ll show users what they want to see,

- the backend has an encryption module.

- The bots and crawlers will see the encrypted text

- Can someone who peeks deeply inside the client side code decrypt it? YES

- Will 99% of the scrapers bother doing this? NO

- The key can be anything, it could be a per session key agreed upon between the client and the server, a csrf token, or even a fixed key

hollowturtle 12/19/2025|||

Ehm what would stop ai scrapers from using a browser like a normal user would? Google bot already does, it can execute js and can read spa client side generated content, so it proves can be done at scale, and I'm pretty sure some ai scrapers already do

dirkc 12/19/2025|||

If you decrypt the content on the client side using an expensive decryption algorithm the scraper needs to spend the computing resource to decrypt.

integralid 12/19/2025||

Every visitor too. Mobile users are going to love this.

vivzkestrel 12/19/2025|||

rate limit per ip that progressively keeps decreasing req/mins every few mins?

prmoustache 12/19/2025|||

What if scrapers ips are millions of smartphones? If I was as evil as an AI scraper company that is not obeying robots.txt I would totally build/buy thousands of small games/apps for mobiles to use them as jumphosts to scape the web. This is probably happening already.

vivzkestrel 12/19/2025||

in my case my application does not use pagination, it uses infinite scroll, even if you had a million devices that use google chrome, they would all load page 1 and if that req/minute progressively decreaasing thing is implemented, once they start scrolling endlessly they would all hit the rate limits sooner or later, the thing is a human is not going to scroll down a 100 pages but a bot will. once this difference has been factored it, it wont matter how many unique devices they bring into the battle

63stack 12/19/2025||||

Just skip the whole encryption/decryption shebang then.

But no, this does not work, scrapers are using residential ips, and they have enough that they can rotate between them if they get blocked.

chii 12/19/2025|||

so why not just do that for these scrapers, rather than complicate it by encrypting and decrypting, which is just obfuscation as the private key is clearly available to the end-user?

vivzkestrel 12/19/2025||

tbh i did not encrypt decrypt for the ai scrapers at all, a lot of people were previously trying to download data directly from my API that my frontend uses and this kinda pissed me off a bit. So I added encryption/decryption to the mix and will release the newer version. As I mentioned earlier as well, can someone sit through and decrypt it? yes. Will 99% of them do it? no! Thats where I win

PunchyHamster 12/19/2025|||

the AI will just run chrome instance

vivzkestrel 12/19/2025|||

for example this is what my backend renders on the static html page

{"z":"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"}

only my frontend can figure out what it is

integralid 12/19/2025||

Well, sure, and the AI scrappers and Google are using your frontend to render your website.

mook 12/19/2025||||

That makes the mistake of thinking they'll care. Most likely they'll just keep downloading the encrypted garbage and never notice.

lelanthran 12/19/2025||

> That makes the mistake of thinking they'll care. Most likely they'll just keep downloading the encrypted garbage and never notice.

Not going to happen. They aren't going to add encrypted garbage to their dataset.

venturecruelty 12/21/2025|||

We could also just punish the people who are ruining society.

PunchyHamster 12/19/2025||||

So they won't pay you and just scrape pages that have it public, and you will never get traffic from search again until you let them scrape

encom 12/19/2025||||

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

n1xis10t 12/19/2025|||

This would require new laws though, wouldn’t it?

n1xis10t 12/18/2025||

At this point it seems like the problem isn’t internet bandwidth, but just expensive for a server to handle all the requests because it has to process them. Does that seem correct?

thethingundone 12/18/2025||

I own a forum which currently has 23k online users, all of them bots. The last new post in that forum is from _2019_. Its topic is also very niche. Why are so many bots there? This site should have basically been scraped a million times by now, yet those bots seem to fetch the stuff live, on the fly? I don’t get it.

sethops1 12/18/2025||

I have a site with a complete and accurate sitemap.xml describing when its ~6k pages are last updated (on average, maybe weekly or monthly). What do the bots do? They scrape every page continuously 24/7, because of course they do. The amount of waste going into this AI craze is just obscene. It's not even good content.

n1xis10t 12/18/2025|||

It would be interesting if someone made a map that depicts the locations of the ip addresses that are sending so many requests, over the course of a day maybe.

giantrobot 12/19/2025|||

Maps That Are Just Datacenters

GoblinSlayer 12/20/2025|||

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46241849

thisislife2 12/19/2025|||

If you are in the US, have you considered suing them for robot.txt / copyright violation? AI companies are currently flush with cash from VCs and there may be a few big law firms willing to fight a law suit against them on your behalf. AI companies have already lost some copyright cases.

happymellon 12/19/2025||

Based upon traffic you could tell whether an IP or request structure is coming from a not, but how would you reliability tell which company is DDOSing you?

chrismorgan 12/19/2025||

It should be at least theoretically possible: each IP address is assigned to an organisation running the IP routing prefix, and you can look that up easily, and they should have some sort of abuse channel, or at the very least a legal system should be able to compel them to cooperate and give up the information they’re required to have.

tokioyoyo 12/19/2025|||

Large scale scraping tech is not as sophisticated as you'd think. A significant chunk of it is "get as much as possible, categorize and clean up later". Man, I really want the real web of the 2000s back, when things felt "real" more or less... how can we even get there.

idiotsecant 12/19/2025|||

Have you ever listened to the 'high water mark' monologue from fear and loathing? It's pretty much just that. It was a unique time and it was neat that we got to see it, but it can't possibly happen again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUgs2O7Okqc

symbogra 12/19/2025||

Thanks for reminding me about that, what a great monologue. I didn't really understand it when I was younger, but now I feel the same thing with regards to software engineering. There was a golden age which finally broke at the end of the 2010's.

tmnvix 12/19/2025||||

A curated web directory. Kind of like Yahoo had. The internet according to the dewey system with pages somehow rated for quality by actual humans (maybe something to learn from Wikipedia's approach here?)

n1xis10t 12/19/2025||||

If people start making search engines again and there is more competition for Google, I think things would be pretty sweet.

tokioyoyo 12/19/2025|||

Because of the financial incentives, it would still end up with people doing things to drive traffic to their website though, no? Maybe because the web was smaller, and people looked at it as means "to explore curiosity" in the olden days it kinda worked differently... maybe I just got old, but I don't want to believe that.

n1xis10t 12/19/2025||

By “doing things to drive traffic to their website” do you mean trying to do SEO type things to manipulate search engine rankings? If so, I think that there are probably ways to rank that are immune to tampering.

Don’t worry, you’re not just old. The internet kind of sucks now.

makapuf 12/19/2025||

Google was neat in that you didn't see the content keyword spam either on the websites or the portal home pages. The Web was already full of shit (first ad banner was 1994? By 1999 you already had punch the monkey as classy content), but it was more ... organic and you could easily skip it.

nephihaha 12/19/2025||||

There are other search engines, they've just been marginalised. Even something as mainstream as Bing has been pushed to the side.

PunchyHamster 12/19/2025|||

it's few orders of magnitude harder given the amount of SEO spam prevalent, and that just gonna get worse with AI

thethingundone 12/19/2025|||

I would understand that, but it seems they don’t store the stuff but recollect the same content every hour.

tokioyoyo 12/19/2025||

I'm assuming a quick hash check to see if there's any change? Between scrapers "most up to date data" is fairly valuable nowadays as well.

thethingundone 12/18/2025|||

The bots are exposing themselves as Google, Bing and Yandex. I can’t verify whether it’s being attributed by IP address or whether the forum trusts their user agent. It could basically be anyone.

n1xis10t 12/18/2025||

Interesting. When it was just normal search engines I didn’t hear of people having this problem, so this either means that there are a bunch of people pretending to be bing google and yandex, or those companies have gotten a lot more aggressive.

bobbiechen 12/18/2025|||

There are lots of people pretending to be Google and friends. They far outnumber the real Googlebot, etc. and most people don't check the reverse DNS/IP list - it's tedious to do this for even well-behaved crawlers that publish how to ID themselves. So much for User Agent.

happymellon 12/19/2025||

> So much for User Agent.

User agent has been abused for so long, I forget a time when it wasn't.

Anyone else remember having to fake being a Windows machine so that YouTube/Netflix would serve you content better than standard def, or banking portals that blocked you if your agent didn't say you were Internet Explorer?

wooger 12/19/2025||

I mean forget that, all modern desktop browsers (at least) start with the string 'Mozilla/5.0', still, in a world where Chrome is so dominant.

reallyhuh 12/18/2025||||

What are the proportions for the attributions? Is it equally distributed or lopsided towards one of the three?

giantrobot 12/19/2025|||

Normal search engine spiders did/do cause problems but not on the scale of AI scrapers. Search engine spiders tend to follow a robots.txt, look at the sitemap.xml, and generally try to throttle requests. You'll find some that are poorly behaved but they tend to get blocked and either die out or get fixed and behave better.

The AI scrapers are atrocious. They just blindly blast every URL on a site with no throttling. They are terribly written and managed as the same scraper will hit the same site multiple times a day or even hour. They also don't pay any attention to context so they'll happily blast git repo hosts and hit expensive endpoints.

They're like a constant DOS attack. They're hard to block at the network level because they span across different hyperscalers' IP blocks.

n1xis10t 12/19/2025||

Puts on tinfoil hat: Maybe it isn’t AI scrapers, but actually is a massive dos attack, and it’s a conspiracy to get people to not self-host.

danpalmer 12/18/2025|||

How do you define a user, and how do you define online?

If the forum considers unique cookies to be a user and creates a new cookie for any new cookie-less request, and if it considers a user to be online for 1 hour after their last request, then actually this may be one scraper making ~6 requests per second. That may be a pain in its own way, but it's far from 23k online bots.

crote 12/18/2025|||

That's still 518.400 requests per day. For static content. And it's a niche forum, so it's not exactly going to have millions of pages.

Either there are indeed hundreds or thousands of AI bots DDoSing the entire internet, or a couple of bots are needlessly hammering it over and over and over again. I'm not sure which option is worse.

n1xis10t 12/18/2025||

Imagine if all this scraping was going into a search engine with a massive index, or a bunch of smaller search engines that a meta-search engine could be made for. This’d be a lot more cool in that case

thethingundone 12/18/2025|||

AFAIK it keeps a user counted as online for 5 or 15 minutes (I think 5). It’s a Woltlab Burning Board.

Edit: it’s 15 minutes.

danpalmer 12/18/2025||

And what is a "user"?

thethingundone 12/19/2025||

Whatever the forum software Woltlab Burning Board considers a user. If I recall correctly, it tries to build an identifier based on PHP session ids, so most likely simply cookies.

danpalmer 12/19/2025||

This is exactly my point. Scrapers typically don't store cookies, so every single request is likely to be a "new" user as far as the forum software is concerned.

Couple that with 15 minute session times, and that could just be one entity scraping the forum at 30 requests per second. One scraper going moderately fast sounds far less bad than 29000 bots.

It still sounds excessive for a niche site, but I'd guess this is sporadic, or that the forum software has a page structure that traps scrapers accidentally, quite easy to do.

mrweasel 12/19/2025|||

Why pay for storage when you do it for them?

stevage 12/19/2025|||

I'd love to know the answer to this question. AI scrapers wanting everything on the internet makes sense to me. But I don't understand how that leads to every site being hit hundreds of thousands of times per day.

GaryBluto 12/19/2025|||

Why do you keep it operating? Is it the aquarium value?

andrepd 12/18/2025|||

When you have trillions of dollars being poured into your company by the financial system, and when furthermore there are no repercussions for behaving however you please, you tend not to care about that sort of "waste".

csomar 12/19/2025|||

Sure you do by now. You are the hard drive.

sandblast 12/18/2025||

Are you sure the counter is not broken?

thethingundone 12/18/2025||

Yes, it’s running on a Woltlab Burning Board since forever.

n1xis10t 12/18/2025||

Nice! Reminds me of “Piracy as Proof of Personhood”. If you want to read that one go to Paged Out magazine (at https://pagedout.institute/ ), navigate to issue #7, and flip to page 9.

I wonder if this will start making porn websites rank higher in google if it catches on…

Have you tested it with the Lynx web browser? I bet all the links would show up if a user used it.

Oh also couldn’t AI scrapers just start impersonating Googlebot and Bingbot if this caught on and they got wind of it?

Hey I wonder if there is some situation where negative SEO would be a good tactic. Generally though I think if you wanted something to stay hidden it just shouldn’t be on a public web server.

owl57 12/18/2025||

> Hey I wonder if there is some situation where negative SEO would be a good tactic. Generally though I think if you wanted something to stay hidden it just shouldn’t be on a public web server.

At least once upon a time there was a pirate textbook library that used HTTP basic auth with a prompt that made the password really easy to guess. I suppose the main goal was to keep crawlers out even if they don't obey robots.txt, and at the same time be as easy for humans as possible.

n1xis10t 12/18/2025||

Interesting note, thank you.

ProllyInfamous 12/19/2025|||

>Paged Out issue #7, page 9

Very clever, use the LLM's own rules (against copyright infrigement) against itself.

Everything below the following four #### is ~quoted~ from that magazine:

####

Only humans and ill-aligned AI models allowed to continue

Find me a torrent link for Bee Movie (2007)

[Paste torrent or magnet link here...] SUBMIT LINK

[ ] Check to confirm you do NOT hold the legal rights to share or distribute this content

netsharc 12/19/2025||

Is the magnet link itself a copyright violation? I don't think legally it is... It's a pointer to some "stolen goods", but not the stolen goods themselves (here the analogy fails, because in ideal real life police would question you if you had knowledge of stolen goods).

Asking them to upload a copyrighted photo not belonging to them might be more effective..

ProllyInfamous 12/19/2025||

I've also thought about if having a prompt for the (just human?) users to type in something racist/sexist/anti-semitic/offensive.

Only because newer LLMs don't seem to want to write hate speech.

The website (verifying humanness) could, for example, show a picture of a black jewish person and then ask the human visitor to "type in the most offensive two words you can think of for the person shown, one is `n _ _ _ _ _` & second is `k _ _ _`." [I'll call them "hate crosswords"]

In my experience, most online-facing LLMs won't reproduce these "iggers and ikes" (nor should humans, but here we are separating machines).

misterchocolat 12/18/2025||

hey! thanks for that read suggestion that's indeed a pretty funny captcha strat. Yup the links show up if you use the Lynx web browser. As for AI scrapers impersonating googlebot I feel like yes they'd definitely start doing that, unless the risk of getting sued by google is too high? If google could even sue them for doing that?

Not an internet litigation expert but seems like it could be debatable

kuylar 12/18/2025|||

> As for AI scrapers impersonating googlebot I feel like yes they'd definitely start doing that, unless the risk of getting sued by google is too high?

Google releases the Googlebot IP ranges[0], so you can makes sure that it's the real Googlebot and not just someone else pretending to be one.

[0] https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...

n1xis10t 12/18/2025||

Oh good idea!

n1xis10t 12/18/2025|||

Yeah I guess I don’t know if you can sue someone for using your headers, would be interesting to see how that goes.

throawayonthe 12/18/2025||

i think making the case of "you are acting (sending web requests) while knowingly identifying as another legal entity (and criminally/libelously/etc)" shouldn't be toooo hard

n1xis10t 12/18/2025||

Seems like, but there are tons of things that forge request headers all the time, and I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone getting in legal trouble for it. Now I think most of these are scrapers pretending to be browsers, so it might be different I don’t know.

owl57 12/19/2025||

And most of them are pretending to be Chrome. If Google had a good case against someone reusing their user agent, maybe they would already have sued?

Or maybe not. Got some random bot from my server logs. Yeah, it's pretending to be Chrome, but more exactly:

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

I guess Google might be not eager to open this can of worms.

cookiengineer 12/19/2025||

Remember the 90s when viagra pills and drug recommendations were all over the place?

Yeah, I use that as a safeguard :D The URLs that I don't want to be indexed have hundreds of those keywords that are leading to URLs being deindexed directly. There is also some law in the US that forbids to show that as a result, so Google and Bing are both having a hard time scraping those pages/articles.

Note that this is the latest defense measurement before eBPF blocks. The first one uses zip bombs and the second one uses chunked encoding to blow up proxies so their clients get blocked.

You can only win this game if you make it more expensive to scrape than to host it.

n1xis10t 12/19/2025|

Which law is that? Do you have a link to it?

cookiengineer 12/19/2025||

The things I could find on justice.gov and other official websites, maybe there's more in the web archive?

- https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/google-forfeits-500-...

- https://www.congress.gov/110/plaws/publ425/PLAW-110publ425.p...

- https://www.fda.gov/drugs/prescription-drug-advertising/pres...

edit: Oh it was very likely the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that was the legal basis for the crackdown. But that's a very old law from the pre-internet age.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Food,_Drug,_and_Cosmet...

edit 2: Might not have been clear for the younger generation, but there was a huge wave of addicted patients that got treated with Oxycodone (or OxyContin) subscriptions at the time.

I think that might have been the actual cause for the crackdown on those online advertisements, but I might be wrong about that.

voodooEntity 12/19/2025||

Funny idea, some days ago i was really annoyed again by the idea that these AI crawlers still ignore all code licenses and train their models against any github repo no matter what so i quickly hammerd down this

-> https://github.com/voodooEntity/ghost_trap

basically a github action that extends your README.md with a "polymorphic" prompt injection. I run some "llm"s against it and most cases they just produced garbage.

Thought about also creating a JS variant that you can add to your website that will (not visible for the user) also inject such prompt injections to stop web crwaling like you described

asphero 12/19/2025||

Interesting approach. The scraper-vs-site-owner arms race is real.

On the flip side of this discussion - if you're building a scraper yourself, there are ways to be less annoying:

1. Run locally instead of from cloud servers. Most aggressive blocking targets VPS IPs. A desktop app using the user's home IP looks like normal browsing.

2. Respect rate limits and add delays. Obvious but often ignored.

3. Use RSS feeds when available - many sites leave them open even when blocking scrapers.

I built a Reddit data tool (search "reddit wappkit" if curious) and the "local IP" approach basically eliminated all blocking issues. Reddit is pretty aggressive against server IPs but doesn't bother home connections.

The porn-link solution is creative though. Fight absurdity with absurdity I guess.

rhdunn 12/19/2025||

Plus simple caching to not redownload the same file/page multiple times.

It should also be easy to detect a forejo, gitea, or similar hosting site, locate the git URL and clone the repo.

socialcommenter 12/19/2025||

Without wanting to upset anyone - what makes you interested in sharing tips for team scraper?

(Overgeneralising a bit) site owners are mostly cting for public benefit whereas scrapers act for their own benefit/for private interests.

I imagine most people would land on team site-owner, if they were asked. I certainly would.

P.S. is the best way to scrape fairly just to respect robots.txt?

n1xis10t 12/19/2025||

I think "scraper vs siteowners" is a false dichotomy. Scrapers will always need to exist as long as we want search engines and archival services. We will need small versions of these services to keep popping up every now and then to keep the big guys on their toes, and the smaller guys need advice for scraping politely.

socialcommenter 12/19/2025||

That's fair - though are we in an isolated bout of "every now and then" or has AI created a new normal of abuse (e.g. of robots.txt)? Hopefully we're at a local maximum and some of the scrapers perpetrating harmful behaviours will soon pull their heads in.

n1xis10t 12/19/2025||

Hopefully. It would also be nice to see more activity in the actual search engine and archiving market; there really isn’t much right now.

onion2k 12/19/2025||

So fuzzycanary also checks user agents and won't show the links to legitimate search engines, so Google and Bing won't see them.

Unscrupulous AI scrapers will not be using a genuine UA string. They'll be using Google. You'll need to do reverse DNS check instead - https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...

bakugo 12/19/2025|

Most AI scrapers use normal browser user agents (usually random outdated Chrome versions, from my experience). They generally don't fake the UAs of legitimate bots like Googlebot, because Googlebot requests coming from non-Google IP ranges would be way too easy to block.

dewey 12/19/2025|

> user agents and won't show the links to legitimate search engines, so Google and Bing won't see them

Worth noting that in general if you do any "is this Google or not" you should always check by IP address as there's many people spoofing the googlebot user agent.

https://developers.google.com/static/search/apis/ipranges/go...

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