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A second side effect of a knee-jerk reaction to bots crawling websites is that if you try to fight all bots, you also end up hurting real users that use "bots". If I run a local script or an LLM that needs to fetch a web page from your site and you block that script or LLM as being a bot, you hurt me, the user. I wanted the information and I have no way of getting at it without investing my own time and effort in going to your website. That might or might not be what you expected, but it's worth taking into account.
And finally, something worth noting is that there are so many websites whose owners complain about bots, but the real problem is that the website is poorly built and should be improved anyway. Bot traffic is not necessarily bad.
What's worked for me is I block any client that don't support brotli compression and http2. Seems to work well enough for stopping scrapers.
No; in this case you are not a user, you are a bot user.
For instance, I wanted to buy a piece of equipment the other day from a local company for a specific usecase. I wanted to find a specific price/weight/specs ratio, and asked an llm to loop through the 20 or so items, fetch their page and calculate and present some values for each. This then led to me going and buying the one I found. So the llm was mainly just an extension of me clicking into every page and making a spreadsheet myself.
However, if it were to continuously poll, or just scrape or something with no intention of buying, I would be no better than a bot.
USER AGENT
not user, an agent on behalf of the user.
the web was intended to be usable by agents belonging to users. in our path of the multiverse, the main agent we think of happens to be live interactive browser. but that need not have been, nor will it be in the future, the dominant USER AGENT.
for a glimpse at one possible futureverse, check out what the home assistant community is up to, how they assemble then update the ambient information displays on their walls. their USER AGENTS are doing what most HN-style "hackers" dreamed of reading scifi as kids.
the alternative is all your in home information owned by corpos when the info should be from user agents not corpo feeds. if you want to vote this idea down, you might be a corpo. :-)
The User Agent would get a HyperText document from a Web server, render it, and show it to the user. You could parse HTML, display images, and follow links - with the assumption the user would want to edit them like any other document. There was no encryption. There was no scripting for dynamic content. Styling was done via semantic markup. There wasn't even any POST when the User Agent term was initially applied. Everything was supposed to be like one big distributed document store instead of centralized hosting on few servers for many client devices.
All that is to say: Regardless what I think sounds nice myself, if the web was just the original vision & definitions instead of everything it changed and grew to become we wouldn't even be using it to have this conversation.
Interestingly, people seem glad to have telephony companies filter bots even though the original idea of the telephone did not call out robocallers as invalid clients. Probably because, unlike the modern Web, the average person gets a chance to see what it means to allow anything inbound even though the original concept never considered robocallers.
I would love some pointers to read up on this, what are some examples of this? Genuinely, not being a troll or ironic
https://www.ycombinator.com/legal
Identified by the user agent header. Which most bots fake or leave out to increase the chance of getting where they are not wanted.
Your bot is a good bot? Great, let us know when you've dealt with all the bad bots and we'll open the doors to the remaining (good) bots again.
Just like you don't process raw data in a data warehouse or datalake by looking at tables, you use a SQL or BI tool, to process all the information on the internet you need to tool to digest it for you. For many, today that tool is a LLM chat interface or agent.
And if not, what if it was a custom browser and not Chrome/Firefox/Edge?
This is a "what if it's for your own good?" argument. What if I break into your house to clean your toilets? Although amusingly, if you're a "web alerts company" that I didn't contract and sends out alerts in batches on your own schedule, you will probably send a ton of your customers to my site at the same time and slashdot me off of the web entirely.
Scenario two: you use software to connect to their server and download a webpage. You are a "bot".
Make it make sense
This is a change. People put up new caching layers, and it urks people running a website in a single small machine. Yes, this could always happen with slashdotting but it's different now.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I think that's a big reason why people want to ban bots.
For example, making a website that only works in Edge and refuses to load for anything else would be a shitty practice. You are free to do it. There's no one stopping you, but you should expect people to bitch about it and they might think you're kind of a jerk or maybe just bad at making websites. It's the same thing when a site actively rejects traffic from curl, wget, or any other common utility that many people find useful.
Overall systems and different business models need to be created that forces AI to pay it's fair share! Elon says there will be an abundance thanks to AI and we wont have to work -- ok how's that gonna work without different systems in place paying us?
I feel strongly about this topic and proposed some systems in this Substack post https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/ai-to-pay-for-all-americans...
People trying to block bots end up keeping out all kinds of users. I get blocked frequently for using a regular browser, just with JS disabled. 99% of the time, I just close the browser tab and move on with my life.
Yes, but no.
I did that. I even printed and bound it in a bunch of dead trees and put it up for sale. The LLMs still stole it.
You are mistaking yourself, well your bot, as his target audience.
You might as well say “If I want to send you my commercial email, and you block it, you hurt me, the email user.”.
While your point of being concerned about cloudflair becoming a global arbiter of who gets in and who does not (which may at times not just mean blocking bots, intentionally or through technical issues), the need to block the deluge of bot traffic is very real for many sites and that is one of the easy options for them to deal with that. There are other methods like directives in robots.txt and nofollow attributes on links, but so many bots simply ignore those that they are not really useful.
> Bot traffic is not necessarily bad.
Nor is it necessarily wanted. In fact, it often isn't. Unfortunately practically all bot runners seem to either assume that their traffic is the special good kind or not care either way.
> I wanted the information and I have no way of getting at it without investing my own time and effort in going to your website.
I WANT! I WANT!! I WANT!!!
Well, that site runner wants you to access the site as a human, if at all, not via bots. Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but what you want isn't always the most important factor for the rest of us.
> but the real problem is that the website is poorly built and should be improved anyway
Firstly: just no.
Secondly: if you and your bot don't like our badly built sites, feel free to go get your information from those that you consider to be better built. Problem solved.
Substitute the word “website” for book, or training course, or documentary or published paper, or patent or one of hundreds of examples.
Now you see the problem.
If the the processing is subject to GDPR (e.g. if controller is in EU) then you do have recourse. You can complain to DPA or sue the company. The company is ultimately responsible for the decision to block you, at least in cases where you personally tried to access the site.
Cloudflare is opt-in so I don't see that being an issue (yet).
If you can still buy a domain, publish a site, and other people read it as usual, then the web is still open imo.
But I can see a lot of negative network effects if/when Cloudflare gets to control 60%+ of web traffic.
you literally can turn off cloudflare and use your own solution
The cure here isn't perfect, but much better than the disease of paying hundreds of dollars a month for scrapers which will never be beneficial.
Worse for the scrapers really isn't anyone's problem but the scrapers'.
The article you're replying to describes in explicit detail how the bots and their operators have directly caused and continue to knowingly cause real harm to the author and others in similar positions, both financial costs and administrative/maintenance burdens that would not have otherwise been required.
You then respond "but if you block the bots then I won't be able to use the bots, and that harms me because I might have to read your web site myself..."
Are you serious?
> That might or might not be what you expected, but it's worth taking into account.
I would wager that for almost everyone who is blocking bots after getting functionally DDoSed by them this is absolutely an expected and desired outcome.
> And finally, something worth noting is that there are so many websites whose owners complain about bots, but the real problem is that the website is poorly built and should be improved anyway.
Both can be true. If you operate a git repository with a public-facing web interface for example there are going to be a lot of possible operations that are inherently expensive but also incredibly rarely used by normal users so it doesn't really matter, but the bots now ignore your robots.txt and are programmed to go after every link they can find, so they trigger every single possible expensive operation more times in a night than your actual users ever have in the history of the site while dividing requests across so many different IP addresses that rate limiting becomes impossible at the individual scale. These days they're even feeding the discovered URLs back in to their models to have them invent new possible URLs and trying those in hopes of finding content never publicly linked. They will send you thousands of requests for URLs that they literally made up.
Sometimes the site is in fact badly coded and operations that should be simple have higher costs due to bad design but you don't have to look very far to find situations where legitimately high-cost resources are exposed to the public because they're expected to be used in a non-abusive way. We should always be standing up against abuse of public resources, unless we want to lose them altogether.
> Bot traffic is not necessarily bad.
You are right, but whether it's good or bad more or less comes down to a cost/benefit analysis. As we've already covered infinite times, these bots being used to train LLMs cause significant real costs to the operators of these sites. What benefits do they offer in return? We know the clickthrough rates are terrible, so what other reasons would site operators have to make those real costs worth it? So someone can get a response back from an algorithm that confidently misinterprets or even entirely misreports what the data actually meant?
Even the most die-hard "information wants to be free" types who absolutely want their datasets trained on would probably prefer that the bots accessed the data directly via an API or downloaded a database dump rather than spidering and scraping a web interface intended for humans.
This is almost always the problem.
This is currently the problem that GitHub is having too. If they had remained with their crusty old rails architecture, very little of this mess [0] would be occurring right now. They would have been able to focus all their engineering talent on scaling the product rather than inventing elaborate client side state synchronization mechanisms.
[0]: https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/qcvjkzcs7j74
[1] https://anubis.techaro.lol/
Of course a sophisticated scraper can "figure out" how to bypass. It isn't trying to be foolproof, it's adding an extra cost to deter massive amounts of bot traffic.
I put it in front of my hobby project because I can't afford to serve hundreds of thousands of bot requests from residential proxies all across the world, and I didn't want to route all of my traffic through a third party company like Cloudflare.
I've been happy with Anubis.
Most people either don’t know or don’t care about “those subcultures”. I bet a lot of older people think it’s a cartoon figure of Betty Boop (nurse) and miss the furry bit since it appears and disappears quickly. Most people also don’t have a brand.
So it seems like you’re describing a concern that only affects a tiny fraction of people:
- Not interested in paying for custom branding, so obviously not a corporation or influencer
- Dislikes cartoons
- Aware of, and hostile towards, “furry” subculture
That has to be an exceedingly small fraction of potential users of Anubis, and given how much businesses and branders will pay to custom-brand something, I’d counsel them to stay the course. Sure, a few never-payers will never pay, but they wouldn’t have anyways, so they can cope with Nurse Betty or look elsewhere for a competing free product.
If you think about this in physical market square terms — in other words, a bazaar — it seems horrendously rude to complain about a shop logo sticker on a free product handed out to anyone that walks up and asks for it. If you want it white-labeled so you can write your own name/logo on it, you pay for the privilege of displacing their name with yours. But you don’t stand there and loudly complain that their shop mascot has dog ears while holding a freebie bag of product, without losing the respect of everyone who hears you doing so.
Also this view seems a bit elderly. For most towards the end of the millennial curve and younger, anime is no longer subculture, its just general culture at this point. Although I would agree it isnt necessarily what you'd want for every platform and web presence.
Try opening gcc bug tracker on your phone: https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/
You're complaining about the symptom (needing to have these checks) not the cause (if they don't, 99% of their traffic will be bots, the site will slow to a crawl and be unusable anyway).
In any case, I saw the dumb anime girl for about 2s then the site loaded. Not a big deal.
What do you propose instead?
It's still valuable to raise the cost of scraping of course. I don't think anything can really stop a determined scraper from impersonating a human. I wonder though if a system similar to Anubis but mining some crypto would make bots _welcome_ - since they're paying for their traffic.
Then they'd be blocking themselves from the website.
While dedicated scrapers/attackers could work around it, and they could do so much more efficiently than the client-side js, almost none of them do. Unless you like paying additional hosting resource fees to serve bots, it's a worthwhile option, and is less annoying to typical human visitors than cloudflare's interactive captcha/challenge which is what most people use.
The main author is aware that the algorithm is far from ideal for this purpose. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48869064 . If more bots start to answer the primitive challenge anubis uses now, that'll hasten implementation of a different algorithm.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. For now, the algorithm or challenge scheme almost doesn't matter. Since it's much smaller-scale than cloudflare's challenges, that's probably why very few scrapers and botnets bother to solve anubis's trivial sha2 pow.
Targeted attacks may not be repelled at all. That's not the point.
Checks for existence of a specific static cookie, if it does not exist, output a small page that sets the cookie via JS and reloads. Sadly this kills Noscript, but it would be possible to add a form in <noscript> that when submitted sets the cookie serverside.
Is this trivial to bypass? Yes. It still keeps out 95% of unwanted bots. Reality is most do not target you specifically they just want to mass-scrape with low effort. Running headless browsers is way more expensive for their op
I've extended this with a FCRDNS checked exclusion for Googlebot.
Another quite effective measure I figured out was checking the existence of Sec-Fetch-Dest header if the User-Agent claims to be a modern browser. If you don't want to close down too much.
Also, I only apply these rules to routes that are not cheap and cached.
They also don't load CSS but for some reason the security theater PoW won the mindshare.
Define "scale". For any reasonable wait that you're willing to impose on your users, any PoW scheme heavily favors attackers. They have unlimited time and can be scraping even while they're asleep. Your visitors on the other hand don't have that luxury. You might argue that's not the point and it's only to stop dumb scrapers that are effectively ddosing your site, but if it's just dumb scrapers, you could've stopped them less onerous measures like tls or javascript fingerprinting.
This is D1 - which has very surprising costs. you may just want to drop D1 and move to a static site. There’s no reason your site should cost this much.
My allegedly more complicated VPS stack needs an afternoon of attention every two years when a new Debian major release is necessary, and costs have been predictable for 15 years, no matter what happened traffic wise.
Loot first, ask questions later.
Over the last 72 hours, Claude-searchbot [1] alone fetched ~205,000 pages. Sent exactly 1 referral. There is a lot of free financial data on the site, hoping for real users to benefit from it. It is hard to not feel a little cheated out that Claude gets to claim "Found it!" to its users without me getting no credits or compensation whatsoever.
[1] Exact user agent `Claude-SearchBot/1.0; +searchbot@anthropic.com)`
Proof: https://i.postimg.cc/Pqc3SS8T/Screenshot-2026-08-07-at-5-33-...
Is it really a bot if it's in response to a human asking for some aggregate information about charities, triggering a web search and then following the result links to get details for the human? Well, clearly yes it is, but it's a very different proposition from this article's implication that "they have no throttling on their scrapers"[1].
> Challenge 46 datacenter ASNs. Humans don't browse from AWS.
People who have workstations in the cloud do.
> The bots use 99% of the bill and I pay 100% of it.
Running a site this way is always a wallet-DDoS risk.
[1] though yes, by far most will be pure automation with no human in the loop. It's an assumption on my part, but feels like a safe one.
What do you mean "this way". What other way is there to run the site?
That's not absent from the article, it's right there in the section titled "The Claude ratio". ChatGPT, Claude, etc. use different user-agents for scraping vs user-initiated requests, and the author notes that user-initiated requests were an absolutely miniscule fraction of the total traffic.
Yeah, googling it does seem like "Claude-User" is for user-initiated requests.
By "Claude sent me" I thought the author meant referer header in real browser requests showed that they came from.
I mean, that's what the section "Pages crawled per visitor referred" refers to, right?
They all shifted from mostly paying for themselves (or being so cheap it didn't matter), to essentially producing zero income while resource usage leapt up in magnitudes
I couldn't justify the stress and hassle of making sites, that a few dozen people a day might find useful, into some complex hyperscalable obligations just to feed the bots
Type something stupid, it "visits" 200 websites and regurgitates some random gibberish.
It's far from perfect, but it was a quick way to get rid of bots, while not completely blocking people from countries such as Vietnam.
However, on a Gitlab instance I manage (500 users), we have to restrict viewing of git logs and pretty much everything except issues. The bots were too aggressive. Chinese crawlers have access to a huge range of IPs and they often do only 10-20 requests per day, while generating in total over 50k requests per day. Our server load went from 99% down to 0.1% after that (and it's a fairly big server).
It makes sense that some crawlers, in the style of Google, would want to index the entire internet. But what is the point of the same crawler re-fetching a page they already fetched an hour ago? Or possibly all this traffic is just independent entities, each trying to cache the internet? The scale of bot traffic makes this seem unlikely.
What's the motivation behind the same entity re-fetching a page it just fetched less than an hour ago?
It can't all be agents reacting to user queries. It's confounding how much CPU and bandwidth is getting flushed down the drain.
And a lot of bad scrapers.
Kinda sounds like we're missing a peer to peer network here.
Instead of downloading the same data over and over again we can just download it once and then share it.
Wouldn't that be better for everyone involved?
It would also function as a distributed WayBack Machine, in case anything ever happens to the Internet Archive. (Which I think is desperately needed, bot apocalypse aside.)
https://commoncrawl.org/
The domain name system is now just a rent seeking scheme. It was great as a temp solution but over time it has deleted more content than preserved. I might in theory be billed for having a country name but I don't pay for a city, street name, house number or postal code. Online you should be able to move your widget shop to widget street. Can bill people who want to live on real estate street or used car street and/or set some requirements.
[1] - https://nochan.net/logs/access.log
[2] - https://nochan.net/logs/botpoop.log
Unfortunately, the best practice is to make css cacheable so you need to keep long histories.
Are you speaking from experience, or inferring from articles like this?
I serve a static site on the lowest Linode $5/month VPS and it is grotesquely overprovisioned for that use case. It is not the case that every site is getting slammed every second by hundreds of requests per second.
Now, if you have some sort of dynamically-computed website that is generated by a slow scripting language that is poorly optimized and hits the database too many times for a single page, yeah, it doesn't take many RPS to take you out. But that isn't the only option; it's the slowest of the slow options. Realistic, there are plenty of sites that match that description, but I concatenated that many clauses on purpose. Drop any one of them and your personal site will be fine.
I survived handling the search search traffic generated by this thread[1] on PC hardware off a residential broadband connection without any sort of degradation. Only time I've gone offline from traffic was when Elon Musk tweeted a link to one of my blog posts, and that was just a short temporary blip.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764
I had a client ask me to look into why their bill spiked 5x (admittedly not by much - from a few dollars to tens). They run a static site, and it turned out someone had inadvertently replaced an image with a massive uncompressed photo. Every unique visitor was caching O(25MB) when they loaded the homepage. Also funny because now everyone has 100Mb+ internet, nobody noticed a few extra seconds on load.
There are lots of solutions to this if you actually need to serve a lot of bytes, but you can get stung even with very simple deployments. Not everyone wants to put Anubis or Cloudflare in front of their site.
The next tier up from free is $25/month or $240 per year.
https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/ https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/free/
But if you want them to actually stop, you can also just serve a little JavaScript page that sets a cookie and refreshes, to anyone who hasn't set the cookie. The DDOS attacker doesn't run JavaScript.
I made this tool to try and make it easier for beginners to get something up on the public web for free: https://weejur.com
The vBulletin and PHPbb style forums have issues with slowdown (I haven’t had a forum since 2015; even back then those forums were overrun with spambots), but static content on a nginx site can be served lightning fast.
I have frequently have had to update a GitHub page, push the change, and then GitHub’s actions puke instead of deploying the change. The workaround is that I have a .txt file with a list of GitHub actions which failed, and when GitHub actions fails, I update that .txt file and push the updated site, which GitHub actions will hopefully successfully deploy.
GitHub pages are OK for pages which aren’t updated very frequently, but they are not OK for pages which update frequently.
If you can't, well then... We're stuck.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/additional-configurat...
my take with all the bots - the web is gonna be a bunch of private walled gardens. with most sites set to no index. you will only discover them via referral from someone real.
It's outside the great firewall. No requirements to hand over SSL keys to China. I worked for companies that ran into these challenges and solutions.
I stopped posting to my website. Why should it be so much work to stop this theft?
Would it be helpful to have geofencing and regulation?
Chatbots have super charged this dynamic though, to the point that it is showing up in the robots.txt data. The last few weeks I've been having Claude rerun some old analysis of Common Crawl from back then, when I have spare usage and time. What I've found is that you can see pretty clearly the rise in people outright blocking AI chatbot related crawlers likely because of how aggressive they have become.
GPTBot is OpenAI, ClaudeBot is Anthropic, CCBot is Common Crawl, Google-Ext is a way for website owners to indicate they don't want their content to be used for AI, Bytespider is Bytedance, Bing and Google are the last two. Take these numbers with a truck of salt, haven't had time to verify them.It's very clear that website owners do not like getting their content scraped and are indicating to GPTBot et al. that they are not welcome. It's a shame that CCBot is caught in the cross fire, but that's life. Bing and Google are doing just fine though, almost like having significant power in the search engine market gives you an advantage in other markets too. Who knew!
> And yes, my site gets its data by scraping those public documents. So I'm a scraper writing a blog post complaining about scrapers. I'm aware of how that sounds.
Being self aware does not make it okey. Either you are okey with scraping (like me) or against it. Don't use it yourself and block your site at the same time.
These same people will be crying about how Cloudflare ruins the internet because they get these captchas.
> And they were only crawling my fund pages (like this one, this one, and this one), which only 10% of real visitors ever touch.
> But those 4,000 bots were just the warm-up.
I just hate this style of writing like you're on Twitter. Why does the above need to be 3 different paragraphs? A paragraph break indicates a separate thought but the author is still talking about the same data and still making their point. The sentence "But those 4,000 bots were just the warm-up." is effective when still the last line of a paragraph and it signals respect for your readers. I stopped reading after this because it's just a terrible reading experience.
Here's a correct version that doesn't read like the author left for a week to think about what the next sentence would be or having some sort of anxiety-induced mental pause:
> Then in November 2025, four thousand "visitors" showed up over a few days. Each visited exactly one page with a bounce rate of 99%. More telling was that they had no referrer, which is usually the easiest way I spot a bot. They were only crawling my fund pages (like this one, this one, and this one), which only 10% of real visitors ever touch. But those 4,000 bots were just the warm-up.
https://patronview.com/news/99-percent-of-my-website-traffic...
And you're totally right: I mostly post on X (nee Twitter) and I probably have ADHD or just a low attention span, so I prefer to read things broken up into paragraphs. But for a smarter audience like this, and that reads long-form blog posts, I should tighten it up.
Thank you for the suggestion. LMK any other edits and I'll be happy to tighten it up.
For other edits I think my qualm applies to other parts of the article but I found that specific paragraph the most impactful way to illustrate what I was talking about. I leave the rest to you as a challenge. Don’t lose sleep over it, there will be more writing in the future to apply it to.
As for the ADHD stuff and the urge to self diagnose consider something less severe but similar symptoms. Have you considered VAST? Here is a good HN comment briefly detailing it and mentioning a book (titled ADHD 2.0 I believe) that may be more in line. I am not a doctor of course and VAST is rather new.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035436
Anyways I will finish reading your article now since you’re so wonderful to take a bit of feedback and be proactive.
There it is. Just like the fckn spammers who ruined SMTP email, scrapers externalize the costs.
Who finances the effort to use residential proxies? That takes a lot of effort, even if it's shoddy