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Re:AI crawlers, fetchers are blowing up websites; Meta, Open... by mcpar-land on Thursday August 21, 2025 @11:52AM (#44974306)
My worst offender for scraping one of my sites was Anthropic. I deployed an ai tar pit (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42725147) to see what it would do it with it, and Anthropic's crawler kept scraping it for weeks. I calculated the logs and I think I wasted nearly a year of their time in total, because they were crawling in parallel. Other scrapers weren't so persistent.
Re:AI crawlers, fetchers are blowing up websites; Meta, Open... by Group_B on Thursday August 21, 2025 @12:49PM (#44975008)
That's hilarious. I need to set up one of these myself
Re:AI crawlers, fetchers are blowing up websites; Meta, Open... by fleebee on Thursday August 21, 2025 @01:18PM (#44975446)
For me it was OpenAI. GTPBot hammered my honeypot with 0.87 requests per second for about 5 weeks. Other crawlers only made up 2% of the traffic. 1.8 million requests, 4 GiB of traffic. Then it just abruptly stopped for whatever reason.
Re:AI crawlers, fetchers are blowing up websites; Meta, Open... by whatevaa on Friday August 22, 2025 @01:12AM (#44981210)
Tar pits and serve fake but legitimate looking content. Poison it.