How to combat large amounts of Ai scrapers
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I understand, but the shift in user behaviour is significant and I think websites are not taking it into account. If the users move more and more to AI, and since Google introduced AI mode it's only a question of time until it becomes the default, we will see more and more of what we thing are AI crawlers and less and less organic users.
AI seems to be the new middleman between you and the user, and if you block the middleman, you block the user. For people with hobby websites or established sites it may make sense because people either know of them, or getting more exposure is not a wish or requirement, but for everyone else, it will be painful.
I honestly don't think most people replace search with AI, it will also slowly solve itself when google injects ads into the output.
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I just realized an interesting thing - if I use Gemini, and tell it to do deep research, it actually goes to the websites it knows/finds, and looks up the content to provide up-to-date answers. So, some of those AI crawlers are actually not crawlers, but actual users who just use AI instead of coming directly to the site.
Soo... blocking AI completely could also potentially reduce exposure, especially as more and more people use AI to basically do searches instead of browsing themselves. That would also explain the amount of requests daily - could be simply different users using AI to research for some topic.
Point is, you should evaluate if the AI requests are just proxies of real users, and blocking AI blocks real users from knowing your site exists.
Porque no los dos?
There is no functional difference between them scraping you systematically and them coming to you on behalf of user. They're coming to scrape you either way, being asked by someone is just going to make them do it in a smarter fashion.
Also, if you're not using Gemini, damned if Google.com doesn't search you with it anyway. They want these AIs trained bad, sooner or later almost all searching will be done through AI. There will eventually be no option.
You are correct that blocking all AI calls well eventually make your search results not work.
So if you want organic traffic, you have to allow ai scraping eventually. You're just going to get diminishing returns until a point.
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everytime i check nginx logs its more scrapers then i can count and i could not find any good open source solutions
In my case I use https://www.bunkerweb.io/ as my proxy for that, but there are other tools like for example https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
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Second Anubis, just finished by setup yesterday i have it of a oracle cloud frre tier vps, which depending on the domain routes the traffic to services hosted on the vps itself or to my server ar home.
Relatively easy to setup, blocks most requests with very few false positives (one of which for example it would aggressively challenge by thunderbird trying to reach my baikal instance). I set a bit more aggresive rules than default (i also block googlebot and bingbot, since i received a bit more requests than I'd like). In like 10 hours it straight up denied about 5000 requests from the ai-catchall ruleset (mostly amazonbot) and challenged about 10000, mostly from a block of IPs in singapore, some of the hosts having the user agent of a Macintosh with PowerPC. They all sure love to explore the public repos on my git server.I'm in the process of changing servers for an upgrade, the old one still hosting more services while I setup the new one. The old one now does run audibly quiter. I don't even want to think how much electricity went wasted because of those bots
You probably don't need me to tell you, but keep good backups. Friend of mine recently had his account nuked without any reason given, and without the possibility of recourse.
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If nginx, here's an open-source blocker/honeypot: https://github.com/raminf/RoboNope-nginx
If you have it set up to be proxied or hosted by Cloudflare, they have their own solution: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-block-ai-bots-scrapers-and-crawlers-with-a-single-click/
wrote last edited by [email protected]I wonder why that RoboNope doesn't just make a fail2ban entry for anything that accesses a disallowed url and drop them entirely.
Actually this look like it would do something similiar, then dumps them to fail2ban after the re-access the honeypot page too many times: https://petermolnar.net/article/anti-ai-nepenthes-fail2ban/
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Porque no los dos?
There is no functional difference between them scraping you systematically and them coming to you on behalf of user. They're coming to scrape you either way, being asked by someone is just going to make them do it in a smarter fashion.
Also, if you're not using Gemini, damned if Google.com doesn't search you with it anyway. They want these AIs trained bad, sooner or later almost all searching will be done through AI. There will eventually be no option.
You are correct that blocking all AI calls well eventually make your search results not work.
So if you want organic traffic, you have to allow ai scraping eventually. You're just going to get diminishing returns until a point.
Eso es correctísimo. I don't want ANY AI in my servers looking for anything, regardless of if they are crawlers or if it's on behalf of some lazy fuck.
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I just realized an interesting thing - if I use Gemini, and tell it to do deep research, it actually goes to the websites it knows/finds, and looks up the content to provide up-to-date answers. So, some of those AI crawlers are actually not crawlers, but actual users who just use AI instead of coming directly to the site.
Soo... blocking AI completely could also potentially reduce exposure, especially as more and more people use AI to basically do searches instead of browsing themselves. That would also explain the amount of requests daily - could be simply different users using AI to research for some topic.
Point is, you should evaluate if the AI requests are just proxies of real users, and blocking AI blocks real users from knowing your site exists.
this does not really apply because i run some frontends so there is not really any information that ai needs
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Well, someone had great idea to use zipbombs. I saw it somewhere but I don’t remember where.
Anubis has this built in if it detects bots it turns the diffuclty to impossible
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In my case I use https://www.bunkerweb.io/ as my proxy for that, but there are other tools like for example https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis
bunkerweb looks intresting
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You probably don't need me to tell you, but keep good backups. Friend of mine recently had his account nuked without any reason given, and without the possibility of recourse.
as I heard that's pretty common at oracle, but it's good to spread the word
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I understand, but the shift in user behaviour is significant and I think websites are not taking it into account. If the users move more and more to AI, and since Google introduced AI mode it's only a question of time until it becomes the default, we will see more and more of what we thing are AI crawlers and less and less organic users.
AI seems to be the new middleman between you and the user, and if you block the middleman, you block the user. For people with hobby websites or established sites it may make sense because people either know of them, or getting more exposure is not a wish or requirement, but for everyone else, it will be painful.
So, what I'm reading is, if your "users" are bad (or bots), just get better users.
Sounds like a net win.
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everytime i check nginx logs its more scrapers then i can count and i could not find any good open source solutions
wrote last edited by [email protected]What's bothering you?
- Is it to give out data for AI training? I guess you can't fundamentally protect against this, except by limiting how much content is provided to each address.
- Or is it the resource strain that it causes on your server? In that case i recommend limiting how much a single client / IP address can request in a day.
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everytime i check nginx logs its more scrapers then i can count and i could not find any good open source solutions
does anubis not work?
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does anubis not work?
i can only get it to protect one container. i have 3 that i need protected and i cant figure out how to run more then one instance of it.
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What's bothering you?
- Is it to give out data for AI training? I guess you can't fundamentally protect against this, except by limiting how much content is provided to each address.
- Or is it the resource strain that it causes on your server? In that case i recommend limiting how much a single client / IP address can request in a day.
its the strain of it i mostly run instances and frontends so the training is not a huge problem
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If nginx, here's an open-source blocker/honeypot: https://github.com/raminf/RoboNope-nginx
If you have it set up to be proxied or hosted by Cloudflare, they have their own solution: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-block-ai-bots-scrapers-and-crawlers-with-a-single-click/
ill check robonope out seems promising
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Anubis is the name of the tool. Also, Cloudflare just announced they have something against AI scrapers.
ive been using Anubis my only issue is i would have to run more then one instance and i dont like cloudflare personaly
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its the strain of it i mostly run instances and frontends so the training is not a huge problem
wrote last edited by [email protected]the keyword you need is "DDoS protection" i guess
it keeps the server from getting overloaded due to too many requests
