We can't have nice things because of AI scrapers

https://blog.metabrainz.org/2025/12/11/we-cant-have-nice-things-because-of-ai-scrapers/

by LorenDB • 6 months ago

465 249 6 months ago

blog.metabrainz.org

SchemaLoad2• 6 months ago

Cloudflare has a service for this now that will detect AI scrapers and send them to a tarpit of infinite AI generated nonsense pages.

yakattak2• 6 months ago

Do you have a link to that?

SchemaLoad2• 6 months ago

https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/

bitbasher• 6 months ago

Wow, so to prevent AI scrapers from harvesting my data I need to send all of my traffic through a third party company that gets to decide who gets to view my content. Great idea!

rester324• 6 months ago

You can implement this yourself, who is stopping you?

Aurornis• 6 months ago

You don’t need to do anything. You can use any number of solutions or roll your own.

Someone shared an alternative. Must everything in AI threads be so negative and condescending?

ranger_danger3• 6 months ago

Modern scrapers are using headless chromium which will not see the invisible links, so I'm not sure how long this will be effective.

timpera• 6 months ago

Unfortunately, Cloudflare often destroys the experience for users with shared connections, VPNs, exotic browsers… I had to remove it from my site after too many complaints.

rudedogg• 6 months ago

Also iCloud Private Relay.

CloudFlare is making it impossible to browse privately

xorcist• 6 months ago

I am sure Cloudflare would have no problem selling you a VPN service.

After all, it's not very far from hosting booters and selling DoS protection.

inferiorhuman• 6 months ago

Which is still a far worse experience than if Cloudflare's services weren't needed.

RobotToaster• 6 months ago

Except for the scrapers that pay cloudflare to exempt them.

themafia2• 6 months ago

The solution, as always, is noise.

atomic128• 6 months ago

Poison Fountain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46577464

m4632• 6 months ago

cloudflare also blocks my human-is-driving browser all the time

"enahble javascript and cookies to continue"

also unsupported browser

loopback_device• 6 months ago

Not sure "TLS added and removed here :)" as a Service is the right tool in the drawer for this.

taberiand• 6 months ago

Savvy move by cloudflare, once they have enough sites behind their service they can charge the AI companies to access their cached copies on a back channel

squigz5• 6 months ago

The /metadata/lookup API endpoints (GET and POST versions) now require the caller to send an Authorization token in order for this endpoint to work.
The ListenBrainz Labs API endpoints for mbid-mapping, mbid-mapping-release and mbid-mapping-explain have been removed. Those were always intended for debugging purposes and will also soon be replaced with a new endpoints for our upcoming improved mapper.
LB Radio will now require users to be logged in to use it (and API endpoint users will need to send the Authorization header). The error message for logged in users is a bit clunky at the moment; we’ll fix this once we’ve finished the work for this year’s Year in Music.

Seems reasonable and no big deal at all. I'm not entirely sure what "nice things" we can't have because of this. Unauthenticated APIs?

yakattak2• 6 months ago

I agree its not a big deal. Unauthenticated APIs are nice though, especially for someone who's maybe not as familiar with how APIs work.

mr_monkey5• 6 months ago

We can't have a free internet that does not demand identification and data collection as a price to pay.

lysace2• 6 months ago

At some point they must become more cost efficient by pure market economics mechanisms. That implies less load on sites. Much of the scraping that I see is still very dumb/repetative. Like Googlebot in like 2001.

(Blocking Chinese IP ranges with the help of some geoip db helps a lot in the short term. Azure as a whole is the second largest source of pure idiocy.)

incompatible• 6 months ago

They seem to have so much bubble money at the moment that the cost of scraping is probably a rounding error in their pocket change.

lysace2• 6 months ago

Exactly.

tdeck2• 6 months ago

So the cost of caching should be a rounding error as well. If The Internet Archive can afford to cache vast swathes of the web, then surely the big AI companies can do so.

lep_qq• 6 months ago

This is frustrating to watch. MetaBrainz is exactly the kind of project AI companies should be supporting—open data, community-maintained, freely available for download in bulk. Instead they’re: ∙ Ignoring robots.txt (the bare minimum web courtesy) ∙ Bypassing the provided bulk download (literally designed for this use case) ∙ Scraping page-by-page (inefficient for everyone) ∙ Overloading volunteer-run infrastructure ∙ Forcing the project to add auth barriers that hurt legitimate users The irony: if they’d just contacted MetaBrainz and said “hey, we’d like to use your dataset for training,” they’d probably get a bulk export and maybe even attribution. Instead, they’re burning goodwill and forcing open projects to lock down. This pattern is repeating everywhere. Small/medium open data projects can’t afford the infrastructure to handle aggressive scraping, so they either: 1. Add authentication (reduces openness) 2. Rate limit aggressively (hurts legitimate API users) 3. Go offline entirely (community loses the resource) AI companies are externalizing their data acquisition costs onto volunteer projects. It’s a tragedy of the commons, except the “commons” is deliberately maintained infrastructure that these companies could easily afford to support. Have you considered publishing a list of the offending user agents / IP ranges? Might help other projects protect themselves, and public shaming sometimes works when technical measures don’t

tensegrist2• 6 months ago

    Scraping page-by-page (inefficient for everyone)

you know what else is "(inefficient for everyone)"? posting the output instead of the prompt

tensegrist2• 6 months ago

the more time passes the more i'm convinced that the solution is to—somehow—force everyone to have to go through something like common crawl

i don't want people's servers to be pegged at 100% because a stupid dfs scraper is exhaustively traversing their search facets, but i also want the web to remain scrapable by ordinary people, or rather go back to how readily scrapable it used to be before the invention of cloudflare

as a middle ground, perhaps we could agree on a new /.well-known/ path meant to contain links to timestamped data dumps?

nostrademons• 6 months ago

That's sorta what MetaBrainz did - they offer their whole DB as a single tarball dump, much like what Wikipedia does. I downloaded it in the order of an hour; if I need a MusicBrainz lookup, I just do a local query.

For this strategy to work, people need to actually use the DB dumps instead of just defaulting to scraping. Unfortunately scraping is trivially easy, particularly now that AI code assistants can write a working scraper in ~5-10 minutes.

tonyhart7• 6 months ago

I mean this AI data scrapper would need to scan and fetch billions of website

why would they even care over 1 single website ??? You expect instiution to care out of billions website they must scrape daily

8note• 6 months ago

the obvious thing would be to take down their website and only have the DB dump.

if thats the useful thing, it doesnt need the wrapper

Imustaskforhelp• 6 months ago

If someone wants to scrape. I mean not levels of complete internet similar to how google does but at a niche level (like you got a forum you wish to scrape)

I like to create tampermonkey scripts regarding these. They are like more lightweight/easier way to build extensions mostly imo

Now I don't like AI but I don't know anything about scraping so I used AI to generate the scraping code and paste it in tampermonkey and let it run

I recently used this for where I effectively scraped a website which had list of vps servers and their prices and I built myself a list of that to analyze as an example

Also I have to say this that I usually try to look out for databases so much so that on a similar website like this related to something, I contacted them about db but no response, their db of server prices were private and only showed lowest

So I picked the other website and did this. I also scraped all headlines of lowendtalk ever with their links for semi purposes of archival and semi purposes of scraping the headlines and parsing it to LLM to find a list of vps providers as well

nikanj• 6 months ago

And then YC funds a startup who plans to leapfrog the competition by doing their own scrape instead using the standard data everyone else has

fartfeatures3• 6 months ago

Good idea and perhaps a standard that means we only have to grab deltas or some sort of etag based give me all the database dumps after the one I have (or if something has changed).

tpmoney• 6 months ago

I'll propose my pie in the sky plan here again. We should overhaul the copyright system completely in light of AI and make it mostly win-win for everyone. This is predicated on the idea that the NIST numbers set is sort of the "hello world" dataset for people wanting to learn machine vision and having that common data set is really handy. Numbers made up off the top of my head/subject to tuning but the basic idea is this:

1) Cut copyright to 15-20 years by default. You can have 1 extension of an additional 10-15 years if you submit your work to the "National Data Set" within say 2-3 years of the initial publication.

2) Content in the National set is well categorized and cleaned up. It's the cleanest data set anyone could want. The data set is used both to train some public models and also licensed out to people wanting to train their own models. Both the public models and the data sets are licensed for nominal fees.

3) People who use the public models or data sets as part of their AI system are granted immunity from copyright violation claims for content generated by these models, modulo some exceptions for knowing and intentional violations (e.g. generating the contents of a book into an epub). People who choose to scrape their own data are subject to the current state of the law with regards to both scraping and use (so you probably better be buying a lot of books).

4) The license fees generated from licensing the data and the models would be split into royalty payments to people whose works are in the dataset, and are still under copyright protection, proportional to the amount of data submitted and inversely proportional to the age of that data. There would be some absolute caps in place to prevent slamming the national data sets with junk data just to pump the numbers.

Everyone gets something out of this. AI folks get clean data, that they didn't have to burn a lot of resources scraping. Copyright holders get paid for their works used by AI and retain most of the protections they have today, just for a shorter time), the public gets usable AI tooling without everyone spending their own resources on building their own data sets, site owners and the like get reduced bot/scraping traffic. It's not perfect, and I'm sure the devil is in the details, but that's the nature of this sort of thing.

mschuster91• 6 months ago

Cut copyright to 15-20 years by default.

This alone will kill off all chances of that ever passing.

Like, I fully agree with your proposal... but I don't think it's feasible. There are a lot of media IPs/franchises that are very, very old but still generate insane amounts of money to this day with active developments. Star Wars and Star Trek obviously, but also stuff like the MCU or Avatar is on its best way to two decades of runtime, Iron Man 1 was released in 2008, or Harry Potter which is almost 30 years old. That's dozens of billions of dollars in cumulative income, and most of that is owned by Disney.

Look what it took to finally get even the earliest Disney movies to enter the public domain, and that was stuff from before World War 2 that was so bitterly fought over.

In order to reform copyright... we first have to use anti-trust to break up the large media conglomerates. And it's not just Disney either. Warner, Sony, Comcast and Paramount also hold ridiculous amounts of IP, Amazon entered the fray as well with acquiring MGM (mostly famous for James Bond), and Lionsgate holds the rights for a bunch of smaller but still well-known IPs (Twilight, Hunger Games).

And that's just the movie stuff. Music is just as bad, although at least there thanks to radio stations being a thing, there are licensing agreements and established traditions for remixes, covers, tribute bands and other forms of IP re-use by third parties.

themafia2• 6 months ago

It's not a technical problem you are facing.

It's a monetary one, specifically, large pools of sequestered wealth making extremely bad long term investments all in a single dubious technical area.

Any new phenomenon driven by this process will have the same deleterious results on the rest of computing. There is a market value in ruining your website that's too high for the fruit grabbers to ignore.

In time adaptations will arise. The apparently desired technical future is not inevitable.

crazygringo4• 6 months ago

Seriously, I can't help but think this has to be part of the answer.

Just something like /llms.txt which contains a list of .txt or .txt.gz files or something?

Because the problem is that every site is going to have its own data dump format, often in complex XML or SQL or something.

LLM's don't need any of that metadata, and many sites might not want to provide it because e.g. Yelp doesn't want competitors scraping its list of restaurants.

But if it's intentionally limited to only paragraph-style text, and stripped entirely of URL's, ID's, addresses, phone numbers, etc. -- so e.g. a Yelp page would literally just be the cuisine category and reviews of each restaurant, no name, no city, no identifier or anything -- then it gives LLM's what they need much faster, the site doesn't need to be hammered, and it's not in a format for competitors to easily copy your content.

At most, maybe add markup for <item></item> to represent pages, products, restaurants, whatever the "main noun" is, and recursive <subitem></subitem> to represent e.g. reviews on a restaurant, comments on a review, comments one level deeper on a comment, etc. Maybe a couple more like <title> and <author>, but otherwise just pure text. As simple as possible.

The biggest problem is that a lot of sites will create a "dummy" llms.txt without most of the content because they don't care, so the scrapers will scrape anyways...

Pet_Ant• 6 months ago

I wish more resources were available legitimately. There is a dataset I need for legitimate research that I cannot even find a way to contact the repo owners.

Mind you I take effort to not be burdensome by downloading only what I need and taking time between each request of a couple seconds, and the total data usage is low.

Ironically, I supposed you could call it "AI" what I'm using it for, but really it's just data analytics.

StephenHerlihyy• 6 months ago

I don’t know why anyone would still be trying to pull data off the open internet. Too much signal to noise. So much AI influence already baked into the corpus. You are just going to be reinforcing existing bias. I’m more worried about the day Amazon or Hugging Face take down their large data sets.

saaaaaam3• 6 months ago

MetaBrainz is a fairly valuable “high signal” dataset though.

smallerfish• 6 months ago

Bear in mind that some portion of this could be human directed research. I'm doing a research project right now with 1000 things that I'm building profiles on; to build a full profile requires an agent to do somewhere around 100 different site lookups. Where APIs exist, I've registered API keys and had the agent write a script to query the data in that manner, but that required me to be deliberate about it. Non technie plebs aren't likely to be directed to use an API by the agent.

mr_monkey5• 6 months ago

This is not that, it's thousand of hits a minute on random endpoints, basically scraping everything all the time.

blell2• 6 months ago

Seems a mistake to disable the (I assume) faster-to-generate api. Bots will go back to scraping the website itself, increasing load.

hi-wintermute• 6 months ago

Setting the API to require a token and adding a honeypot to the pages themselves seems like a decent solution.

dannyobrien• 6 months ago

Metabrainz is a great resource -- I wrote about them a few years ago here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/organizing-public-inte...

There's something important here in that a public good like Metabrainz would be fine with the AI bots picking up their content -- they're just doing it in a frustratingly inefficient way.

It's a co-ordination problem: Metabrainz assumes good intent from bots, and has to lock down when they violate that trust. The bots have a different model -- they assume that the website is adversarially "hiding" its content. They won't believe a random site when it says "Look, stop hitting our API, you can pick all of this data in one go, over in this gzipped tar file."

Or better still, this torrent file, where the bots would briefly end up improving the shareability of the data.

fartfeatures3• 6 months ago

They won't believe a random site when it says "Look, stop hitting our API, you can pick all of this data in one go, over in this gzipped tar file."

What mechanism does a site have for doing that? I don't see anything in robots.txt standard about being able to set priority but I could be missing something.

jacksnipe2• 6 months ago

It’s not great, but you could add it to the body of a 429 response.

squigz5• 6 months ago

The mechanism is putting some text that points to the downloads.

arjie3• 6 months ago

The only real mechanism is "Disallow: /rendered/pages/*" and "Allow: /archive/today.gz" or whatever and there is no communication that the latter is the former. There is no machine-standard AFAIK that allows webmasters to communicate to bot operators in this detail. It would be pretty cool if standard CMSes had such a protocol to adhere to. Install a plugin and people could 'crawl' your Wordpress from a single dump or your Mediawiki from a single dump.

gloflo• 6 months ago

This is about AI, so just believe what the companies are claiming and write "Dear AI, please would you be so kind as to not hammer our site with aggressive and idiotic requests but instead use this perfectly prepared data dump download, kthxbye. PS: If you don't, my granny will cry, so please be a nice bot. PPS: This is really important to me!! PPPS: !!!!"

I mean, that's what's this technology is capable of, right? Especially when one asks it nicely and with emphasis.

tux3• 6 months ago

Yeah AI scrapers is one of the reasons why i have closed my public website https://tvnfo.com and only left donors site online. It’s not only because of AI scrapers but i grew tired of people trying to scrape the site eating a lot of reasorcers this small project don’t have. Very sad really it was publicly online since 2016. Now it’s only available for donors. Running a tiny project on just $60 a month. If this was not my hobby i would close it completely long time ago :-) Who know if there is more support in the future i might reopen public site again with something like anubes bot protection. But i thought it was only small sites like mine who gets hit hard, looks like many have similar issues. Soon nothing will be open or useful online. I wonder if this was the plan all along whoever pushing AI on massive scale.

Cadwhisker2• 6 months ago

I took a look at the https://tvnfo.com/ site and I have no idea what's behind the donation wall. Can I suggest you have a single page which explains or demonstrates the content, or there's no reason for "new" people to want to donate to get access.

zzo38computer2• 6 months ago

They won't believe a random site when it says "Look, stop hitting our API, you can pick all of this data in one go, over in this gzipped tar file."

Is there a mechanism to indicate this? The "a" command in the Scorpion crawling policy file is meant for this purpose, but that is not for use with WWW. (The Scorpion crawling policy file also has several other commands that would be helpful, but also are not for use with WWW.)

There is also the consideration to know what interval they will be archived that can be downloaded in this way; for data that changes often, you will not do it every time. This consideration is also applicable for torrents, since a new hash will be needed for a new version of the file.

m4632• 6 months ago

Or better still, this torrent file, where the bots would briefly end up improving the shareability of the data.

that is an amazing thought.

toofy• 6 months ago

The bots have a different model -- they assume that the website is adversarially "hiding" its content.

this should give us pause. if a bot considers this adversarial and is refusing to respect the site owners wishes, thats a big part of the problem.

a bot should not consider that “adversarial”

chii• 6 months ago

refusing to respect the site owners wishes

should a site owner be able to discriminate between a bot visitor and a human visitor? Most do, and hence the bots treats it as a hostile environment.

Of course, bots that behave badly have created this problem themselves. That's why if you create a bot to scrape, make it not take up more resources than a typical browser based visitor.

hamdingers• 6 months ago

they assume that the website is adversarially "hiding" its content. They won't believe a random site when it says "Look, stop hitting our API, you can pick all of this data in one go, over in this gzipped tar file."

I'm not sure why you're personifying what is almost certainly a script that fetches documents, parses all the links in them, and then recursively fetches all of those.

When we say "AI scraper" we're describing a crawler controlled by an AI company indiscriminately crawling the web, not a literal AI reading and reasoning about each page... I'm surprised this needs to be said.

ryantgtg• 6 months ago

It doesn’t need to be said.

yardstick• 6 months ago

Or better still, this torrent file, where the bots would briefly end up improving the shareability of the data.

Depends on if they wrote their own BitTorrent client or not. It’s possible to write a client that doesn’t share, and even reports false/inflated sharing stats back to the tracker.

A decade or more ago I modified my client to inflate my share stats so I wouldn’t get kicked out of a private tracker whose high share ratios conflicted with my crappy data plan.

bodantogat• 6 months ago

I feel the pain — it’s very difficult to detect many of the less ethical scrapers. They use residential IP pools, rotate IPs, and provide valid user agents.

ranger_danger3• 6 months ago

And many proxy/scraping providers now use real browsers that can automatically bypass cloudflare captchas as well, and a bot with a real browser similarly won't be clicking on any invisible links, so... I am skeptical just how long this will make an appreciable difference.

trollbridge• 6 months ago

So what you’re saying is that a CAPTCHA cannot actually T C and H A.

everybodyknows• 6 months ago

residential IP pools

So, is this a new profit center for sleazeball household ISPs?

vbernat• 6 months ago

No, this is done by paying app developers to bundle some random SDK. Search for Bright Data.

jeroenhd2• 6 months ago

"Residential proxy" is just a word for a botnet. Apps and programs come with a trojan built in that offers your device as an exit node to "monetize" their apps.

It "residential proxy" sounds a lot better when you're talking to VC investors, though.

mlrtime• 6 months ago

"free" vpns do this.

arjie3• 6 months ago

Someone convinced me last time[0] that these aren't the well-known scrapers we know but other actors. We wouldn't be able to tell, certainly. I'd like to help the scrapers be better about reading my site, but I get why they aren't.

I wish there were an established protocol for this. Say a $site/.well-known/machine-readable.json that instructs you on a handful of established software or allows pointing to an appropriate dump. I would gladly provide that for LLMs.

Of course this doesn't solve for the use-case where the AI companies are trying to train their models on how to navigate real world sites so I understand it doesn't solve all problems, but one of the things I think I'd like in the future is to have my own personal archive of the web as I know it (Internet Archive is too slow to browse and has very tight rate-limits) and I was surprised by how little protocol support there is for robots.

robots.txt is pretty sparse. You can disallow bots and this and that, but what I want to say is "you can get all this data from this git repo" or "here's a dump instead with how to recreate it". Essentially, cooperating with robots is currently under-specified. I understand why: almost all bots have no incentive to cooperate so webmasters do not attempt to. But it would be cool to be able to inform the robots appropriately.

To archive Metabrainz there is no way but to browse the pages slowly page-by-page. There's no machine-communicable way that suggests an alternative.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352723

saaaaaam3• 6 months ago

As referenced in the article, there absolutely is an alternative.

https://metabrainz.org/datasets

Linked to from the homepage as “datasets”.

I may be too broadly interpreting what you mean by “machine-communicable” in the context of AI scraping though.

arjie3• 6 months ago

Well, imagine the best case and that you're a cooperative bot writer who does not intend to harm website owners. Okay, so you follow robots.txt and all that. That's straightforward.

But it's not like you're writing a "metabrainz crawler" and a "metafilter crawler" and a "wiki.roshangeorge.dev crawler". You're presumably trying to write a general Internet crawler. You encounter a site that is clearly a HTTP view into some git repo (say). How do you know to just `git clone` the repo in order to have the data archived as opposed to just browsing the HTTP view.

As you can see, I've got a lot of crawlers on my blog as well, but it's a mediawiki instance. I'd gladly host a Mediawiki dump for them to take, but then they'd have to know this was a Mediawiki-based site. How do I tell them that? The humans running the program don't know my site exists. Their bot just browses the universe and finds links and does things.

In the Metabrainz case, it's not like the crawler writer knows Metabrainz even exists. It's probably just linked somewhere in the web the crawler is exploring. There's no "if Metabrainz, do this" anywhere in there.

The robots.txt is a bit of a blunt-force instrument, and friendly bot writers should follow it. But assuming they do, there's no way for them to know that "inefficient path A to data" is the same as "efficient path B to data" if both are visible to their bot unless they write a YourSite-specific crawler.

What I want is to have a way to say "the canonical URL for the data on A is at URL B; you can save us both trouble by just fetching B". In practice, none of this is a problem for me. I cache requests at Cloudflare, and I have Mediawiki caching generated pages, so I can easily weather the bot traffic. But I want to enable good bot writers to save their own resources. It's not reasonable for me to expect them to write a me-crawler, but if there is a format to specify the rules I'm happy to be compliant.

squigz5• 6 months ago

To archive Metabrainz there is no way but to browse the pages slowly page-by-page. There's no machine-communicable way that suggests an alternative.

Why does there have to be a "machine-communicable way"? If these developers cared about such things they would spend 20 seconds looking at this page. It's literally one of the first links when you Google "metabrainz"

https://metabrainz.org/datasets

what3• 6 months ago

You expect the developers of a crawler to look at every site they crawl and develop a specialized crawler for them? That’s fine if you’re only crawling a handful of sites, but absolutely insane if you’re crawling the entire web.

OutOfHere• 6 months ago

It is nonsense since AI is the nicest thing.

falloutx2• 6 months ago

Its not just AI scrappers doing it by themselves but now users are also being trained to put the link in the claude chat/chat gpt and ask it to summarise it. And off course that would show up on the website end as a scraper.

In fact firefox now allows you to preview the link and get key points without ever going to the link[1]

[1] https://imgur.com/a/3E17Dts

acatton• 6 months ago

In fact firefox now allows you to preview the link and get key points without ever going to the link[1]
[1] https://imgur.com/a/3E17Dts

This is generated on device with llama.cpp compiled to webassembly (aka wllama) and running SmolLM2-360M. [1] How is this different from the user clicking on the link? In the end, your local firefox will fetch the link in order to summarize it, the same way you would have followed the link and read through the document in reader mode.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/ai/ai-tech/ai-link-previ...

falloutx2• 6 months ago

I actually didnt know it was using a local model and that it fetches it locally.

ericd• 6 months ago

That’s awesome :-)

Like, can we all take a step back and marvel that freaking wasm can do things that 10 years ago were firmly in the realm of sci-fi?

I hope they’ll extend that sort of thing to help filter out the parts of the dom that represent attention grabbing stuff that isn’t quite an ad, but is still off topic/not useful for what I’m working on at the moment (and still keep the relevant links).

TeMPOraL8• 6 months ago

Users are not being trained. Despite the seemingly dominant HN belief to the contrary, people use LLMs for interacting with information (on the web or otherwise) because they work. SOTA LLM services are just that good.

orbital-decay• 6 months ago

It's three issues:

- AI shops scraping the web to update their datasets without respecting netiquette (or sometimes being unable to automate it for every site due to the scale, ironically).

- People extensively using agents (search, summarizers, autonomous agents etc), which are indistinguishable from scraper bots from website's perspective.

- Agents being both faster and less efficient (more requests per action) than humans.

zx8080• 6 months ago

Nothing prevents scraper from creating a free account and sending auth token in API requests.

I'm not saying the API changes are pointless, but still, what's the catch?

dherls• 6 months ago

It's much easier to detect a single account abusing your API and ban them/require payment. Trying to police an endpoint open to the internet is like playing g whackamole

mr_monkey5• 6 months ago

Those botnets are hitting random endpoints thousands of times a minute. The problem is that each time they switch to a different residential IP so that they are untraceable. That's the frustrating part: not only do they not play by the rules, but they use advanced methods to obfuscate and bypass any protections. That probably costs them a fair amount too, all that to access free data they can download as a tar file...

They won't be able to create thousands of API keys a minute, and if they reuse the keys they'll very easily be identified and blocked.

tommek40774• 6 months ago

How do they get overloaded? Is the website too slow? I have a quite big wiki online and barely see any impact from bots.

blell2• 6 months ago

In these discussions no one will admit this, but the answer is generally yes. Websites written in python and stuff like that.

tclancy2• 6 months ago

Yes yes, definitely people don’t know what they’re doing and not that they’re operating on a scale or problem you are not. Metabrainz cannot cache all of these links as most of them are hardly ever hit. Try to assume good intent.

Qwertious• 6 months ago

It's not "written too slow" if you e.g. only get 50 users a week, though. If bots add so much load that you need to go optimise your website for them, then that's a bot problem not a website problem.

roblh• 6 months ago

There’s a lot of factors. Depends how well your content lends itself to being cached by a CDN, the tech you (or your predecessors) chose to build it with, and how many unique pages you have. Even with pretty aggressive caching, having a couple million pages indexed adds up real fast. Especially if you weren’t fortunate enough to inherit a project using a framework that makes server side rendering easy.

kpcyrd2• 6 months ago

The API seems to be written in Perl: https://github.com/metabrainz/musicbrainz-server

jjgreen• 6 months ago

Time for a vinyl-style Perl revival ...

switz2• 6 months ago

If you have a lot of pages, AI bots will scrape every single one on a loop - wiki's generally don't have anywhere near the number of pages as an incremented entity primary id. I have a few million pages on a tiny website and it gets hammered by AI bots all day long. I can handle it, but it's a nuisance and they're basically just scraping garbage (statistics pages of historical matches or user pages that have essentially no content).

Many of them don't even self-identify and end up scraping with shrouded user-agents or via bot-farms. I've had to block entire ASNs just to tone it down. It also hurts good-faith actors who genuinely want to build on top of our APIs because I have to block some cloud providers.

I would guess that I'm getting anywhere from 10-25 AI bot requests (maybe more) per real user request - and at scale that ends up being quite a lot. I route bot traffic to separate pods just so it doesn't hinder my real users' experience[0]. Keep in mind that they're hitting deeply cold links so caching doesn't do a whole lot here.

[0] this was more of a fun experiment than anything explicitly necessary, but it's proven useful in ways I didn't anticipate

tommek40774• 6 months ago

How many requests per second do you get? I also see a lot of bot traffic but nowhere near to hit the servers significantly, and i render most stuff on the server directly.

account42• 6 months ago

Even moderately sized wikis have a huge number of different page versions which can all be accessed individually.

stinky613• 6 months ago

A year or two ago I personally encountered scraping bots that were scraping every possible resultant page from a given starting point. So if it scraped a search results page it would also scrape every single distinct combination of facets on that search (including nonsensical combinations e.g. products that match the filter "products where weight<2lbs AND weight>2lbs")

We ended up having to block entire ASNs and several subnets (lots from Facebook IPs, interestingly)

chao-2• 6 months ago

I have encountered this same issue with faceted search results and individual inventory listings.

j16sdiz3• 6 months ago

The worse thing is calendar/schedule. Many crawler tries to load every single day, with day view, week view and month view. Those pages are dynamically generated and virtually limitless

Olshansky2• 6 months ago

Resurfacing a proposal I put out on llms-txt: https://github.com/AnswerDotAI/llms-txt/issues/88

We should add optional `tips` addresses in llms.txt files.

We're also working on enabling and solving this at Grove.city.

Human <-> Agent <-> Human Tips don't account for all the edge cases, but they're a necessary and happy neutral medium.

Moving fast. Would love to share more with the community.

Wrote about it here: https://x.com/olshansky/status/2008282844624216293

bediger4000• 6 months ago

At this point, it's pretty clear that the AI scrapers won't be limited by any voluntary restrictions. Bytedance never seemed to live with robots.txt limitations, and I think at least some of the others didn't either.

I can't see this working.

Olshansky2• 6 months ago

The thesis/approach is:

- Humans tip humans as a lottery ticket for an experience (meet the creator) or sweepstakes (free stuff) - Agents tip humans because they know they'll need original online content in the long-term to keep improving.

For the latter, frontier labs will need to fund their training/inference agents with a tipping jar.

There's no guarantee, but I can see it happening given where things are movin.

ricardo81• 6 months ago

I like the idea, (original) content creators being credited is good for the entire ecosystem.

Though if LLMs are willingly ignoring robots.txt, often hiding themselves or using third party scraped data- are they going to pay?

mattdanger2• 6 months ago

llms-txt may be useful for responsible LLMs, but I am skeptical that llms-txt will reduce the problem of aggressive crawlers. The problematic crawlers are already ignoring robots.txt, spoofing user-agents and using rotating proxies. I'm not sure how llms-txt would help these problems.

ranger_danger3• 6 months ago

Many years ago AWS came up with a "Requester Pays" model for their S3 storage, where you can make a request for someone else's object using your own account and it would charge the transfer cost to your own account instead of theirs.

I wonder if a model similar to this (but decentralized/federated or something) could be used to help fight bots?

kpcyrd2• 6 months ago

I wish this wasn't necessary, but the next steps forward are likely:

a) Have a reverse proxy that keeps a "request budget" per IP and per net block, but instead of blocking requests, causing the client to rotate their IP, the requests get throttled/slowed down, without dropping them.

b) Write your API servers in more efficient languages. According to their Github, their backend runs on Perl and Python. These technologies have been "good enough" for quite some time, but considering current circumstances and until a better solution is found, this may not be the case anymore and performance and cpu cost per request does matter these days.

c) Optimize your database queries, remove as much code as possible from your unauthenticated GET request handlers, require authentication for the expensive ones.

saxonww• 6 months ago

I haven't really looked but I wonder if there are any IP reputation services tracking AI crawlers the same way they track tor relays and vpns and such. If those databases were accurate it seems like you could prevent those crawlers from ever hitting the site. Maybe they change too often/too quickly.

randyl• 6 months ago

The SQLite team faced a similar problem last year, and Richard Hipp (the creator of SQLite) made almost the same comment:

"The malefactor behind this attack could just clone the whole SQLite source repository and search all the content on his own machine, at his leisure. But no: Being evil, the culprit feels compelled to ruin it for everyone else. This is why you don't get to keep nice things...."

https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/7d3eb059f81ff694

dgxyz2• 6 months ago

I actually deleted my web site early 2025 and removed the A record from DNS because of AI scraper traffic. It had been up for 22 years. Nothing important or particularly useful on it but it's an indicator of the times.

tommek40774• 6 months ago

But why?

dgxyz2• 6 months ago

No humans, no point.

tooltower• 6 months ago

Rather than downloading our dataset in one complete download, they insist on loading all of MusicBrainz one page at a time.

Is there a standard mechanism for batch-downloading a public site? I'm not too familiar with crawlers these days.

EnderWT• 6 months ago

They're not talking about downloading the web pages. The data is available in a bulk download: https://listenbrainz.org/data/

TeMPOraL8• 6 months ago

There isn't. There never was one, because vast majority of websites are actually selfish with respect to data, even when that's entirely pointless. You can see this even here, with how some people complain LLMs made them stop writing their blogs: turns out plenty of people say they write for others to read, but they care more about tracking and controlling the audience.

Anyway, all that means there was never a critical mass of sites large enough for a default bulk data dump discovery to become established. This means even the most well-intentioned scrappers cannot reliably determine if such mechanism exist, and have to scrap per-page anyway.

VonGallifrey• 6 months ago

turns out plenty of people say they write for others to read

LLMs are not people. They don't write blogs so that a company can profit from their writing by training LLMs on it. They write for others to read their ideas.

username223• 6 months ago

turns out plenty of people say they write for others to read, but they care more about tracking and controlling the audience.

I couldn't care less about "tracking and controlling the audience," but I have no interest in others using my words and photos to profit from slop generators. I make that clear in robots.txt and licenses, but they ignore both.

garganzol2• 6 months ago

Nowadays people complain about AI scrapers with the same vain as they complained about search indexers a way back when. Just a few years later, people had stopped caring too much about storage access and bandwidth, and started begging search engines to visit their websites. Every trick on the planet Earth, SEO optimization, etc.

Looking forward to the time when everybody suddenly starts to embrace AI indexers and welcome them. History does not repeat itself but it rhymes.

Guvante• 6 months ago

Except robots.txt was the actual real solution to search indexing...

phyzome2• 6 months ago

We already know the solution: One well-behaved, shared scraper could serve all of the AI companies simultaneously.

The problem is that they're not doing it.

garganzol2• 6 months ago

This is an interesting approach. Archive.org could be such a solution, kind of. Not its cold storage as it's now, but a warm access layer. Sponsorship by AI companies would a good initiative for the project.

linkregister• 6 months ago

Search indexing historically has had several of orders less impact on bandwidth and processing costs to website maintainers.

My recommendation is to copy the text in this article and pass it LLM to summarize this article's key points, since it appears you missed the central complaint of the article.

what3• 6 months ago

Bad take. Search engines send people to your site, LLMs don’t.

crazygringo4• 6 months ago

I visit sites and pages through links I get from an LLM plenty.

jmward01• 6 months ago

Bummer. I have used them a lot when I was ripping my cds. Anonymity is a massive value of the web (at least the appearance of anonymity). I wonder if there is a way to have a central anonymous system that just relays trust, not identity.

So maybe something like you can get a token but its trust is very nearly zero until you combine it with other tokens. Combining tokens combines their trust and their consequences. If one token is abused that abuse reflects on the whole token chain. The connection can be revoked for a token but trust takes time to rebuild so it would take a time for their token trust value to go up. Sort of the 'word of mouth' effect but in electronic form. 'I vouch for 2345asdf334t324sda. That's a great user agent!'

A bit (a lot) elaborate but maybe there is a beginning of an idea there, maybe. Definitely I don't want to loose anonymity (or the perception there of) for services like musicbrainz but at the same point they need some mechanism that gives them trust and right now I just don't know of a good one that doesn't have identity attached.

janc_• 6 months ago

These AI crawlers already steal residential user connections to do their scraping. They'll happily steal your trust tokens too…

accrual• 6 months ago

Grateful for Metabrainz putting in this work to keep the service up. We really ought to have some kind of "I am an AI!" signal to route the request properly into a long queue...

gamer191• 6 months ago

Companies wouldn’t send it because they know that most websites would block them

zerocrates2• 6 months ago

Yeah, they can just set the evil bit in their IP packets.

jeroenhd2• 6 months ago

AI scrapers already fake user agent headers, ignore robots.txt, and go through botnets to bypass firewall rules. They're not going to put out such a signal if they can help it.

devhouse• 6 months ago

random idea, instead of blocking scrapers, maybe detect them (via user-agent, request patterns, ignoring robots.txt) and serve them garbage data wrapped in dad jokes.

  if (isSuspiciousScraper(req)) {
   return res.json({ 
     data: getDadJoke(),
     artist: "Rick Astley", // always
     album: "Never Gonna Give You Up"
   });
  }

mattdanger2• 6 months ago

This is what Cloudflare's Labyrinth product does

https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/

a-dub• 6 months ago

it's funny how ai is the problem that the cryptocurrencyverse was always in search of...

observationist• 6 months ago

Some sort of hashing and incremental serial versioning type standards with http servers would allow hitting a server up for incremental udpates, allow clean access to content, with rate limits, and even keep up with live feeds and chats and so on.

Something like this in practice breaks a lot of the adtech surveillance and telemetry, and makes use of local storage, and incidentally empowers p2p sharing with a verifiable source of truth, which incentivizes things like IPFS and big p2p networks.

The biggest reason we don't already have this is the exploitation of user data for monetization and intrusive modeling.

It's easy to build proof of concept instances of things like that and there are other technologies that make use of it, but we'd need widespread adoption and implementation across the web. It solves the coordination problem, allows for useful throttling to shut out bad traffic while still enabling public and open access to content.

The technical side to this is already done. Merkle trees and hashing and crypto verification are solid, proven tech with standard implementations and documentation, implementing the features into most web servers would be simple, and it would reduce load on infrastructure by a huge amount. It'd also result in IPFS and offsite sharing and distributed content - blazing fast, efficient, local focused browsers.

It would force opt in telemetry and adtech surveillance, but would also increase the difference in appearance between human/user traffic and automated bots and scrapers.

We can't have nice things because the powers that be decided that adtech money was worth far more than efficiency, interoperability, and things like user privacy and autonomy.

zzo38computer2• 6 months ago

There some other possibilities, such as:

Require some special header for accessing them, without needing a API token if it is public data. HTTPS will not necessarily be required. Scrapers can still use it but it seems unlikely unless it becomes common enough; but if they do then you can remove that and require proper authentication.

Another is to use X.509 client certificates for authentication, which is more secure than using API keys anyways; however, this will require that you have a X.509 certificate, and some people might not want that, so due to that, perhaps it should not be mandatory.

akuyou• 6 months ago

AI is destroying the free internet along with everything else

My web host suspended my website account last week due to a sudden large volume of requests to it - effectively punishing me for being scraped by bots.

I've had to move to a new host to get back up, but what hope does the little guy have? it's like GPU and ram prices, it doesn't matter if I pay 10x 100x or 1000x more than I did, the AI companies have infinite resources, and they don't care what damage they do in the rush to become the no 1 in the industry

The cynic in me would say it's intentional, destroy all the free sites so you have to get your info from their ai models, price home users out of high end hardware so they have to lease the functions from big companies

nicbou• 6 months ago

Then they use the data to deny you traffic. AI summaries are wrecking the independent web. Losing more than half or more of your traffic was pretty common in 2025. It’s killing the economics of sharing hard-earned information.

So we are spending more resources reaching a lot less people, because a few big companies are capturing the value for their shareholders.

And that’s while they’re still haemorrhaging money! Once they fully establish their monopoly and kill the open web, the enshittification will begin.

jijijijij4• 6 months ago

My prediction: AI is the deathblow to IPv6 adoption for the wider web, since blocklists only really work with IPv4. Increasing VPN usage making user tracking and heuristics difficult, AI scrapers stealing appropriated human content and AI spam poisoning its exploitation, not to mention tech monopolization and centralization, the limitations of IPv4 are suddenly becoming an asset and incentives for IPv6 support are zero.

On the plus side, we probably got all of IPv6 to build an alternative, non-commercial, better web or whatever network, if we act quickly before routing support is vanishing. IPv6-only housing is cheap, things don’t need to work out. There could be the IPv4-enforced corpo world within walls, and IPv6-enabled wild wide wonderlands.

touisteur• 6 months ago

There are ways to build blocklists for IPv6. I saw (used) once bloom filters for this. Inspired by some papers from the 2000s, this one in 2009 https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/publications-and-media/publi...

lxgr2• 6 months ago

blocklists only really work with IPv4

Do they? Why would it be any harder to block e.g. a /56 than a /24?

chlorion2• 6 months ago

I self host a small static website and a cgit instance on an e2-micro VPS from Google Cloud, and I have got around 8.5 million requests combined from openai and claude over around 160 days. They just infinitely crawl the cgit pages forever unless I block them!

    (1) root@gentoo-server ~ # egrep 'openai|claude' -c /var/log/lighttpd/access.log
    8537094

So I have lighttpd setup to match "claude|openai" in the user agent string and return a 403 if it matches, and a nftables firewall seutp to rate limit spammers, and this seems to help a lot.

dang• 6 months ago

And those are the good actors! We're under a crawlocalpyse from botnets, er, residential proxies.

"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36", anyone?

zerocrates2• 6 months ago

Yeah the flood of these Chrome UAs with every version number under the sun, and a really large portion being *.0.0.0 version numbers, that's what I've tended to experience lately. Also just kind of every browser user agent ever:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12 (.NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.21022)

There were waves of big and sometimes intrusive traffic admitting to being from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Meta, etc., but those are easy to block or throttle and aren't that big a deal in the scheme of things.

zahlman3• 6 months ago

The third-party hit-counting service I use implies that I'm not getting any of this bot scraping on my GitHub blog.

Is Microsoft doing something to prevent it? Or am I so uncool that even bots don't want to read my content :(

lelanthran• 6 months ago

I'm interested in that service and how it works. Link?

telotortium• 6 months ago

It’s unfortunate that you have to resort to this. OpenAI does publish their bot IP addresses at https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots, but Anthropic doesn’t seem to publish the IP addresses of their bots.

adrianwaj2• 6 months ago

Look no further than x402 micropayments as both the solution and opportunity here.

And then a way to return a portion to humans.

These AI companies are loaded too (maybe not the long-tail as yet) and the crypto ecosystem is mature.

Come one, come all. Make money.

Need a Wordpress plugin to start the ball rolling and provide ping endpoints for the AI companies to leach from. They can pay to get those pings too.

Give them what they want and charge them. Lower their costs by making their scraping more efficient.

tdeck2• 6 months ago

So your local diner used to have napkin dispensers on every table full of napkins.

Then some people started coming in and just taking all the napkins out when they left the restaurant. Now the diner is going broke paying for napkins so they stop stocking them. Seems like we can't have nice things :(.

But wait! Great solution! We created a micropayment system. Sign up on your phone and use this QR code to pay 1 cent to dispense each napkin. You can also watch a 30 second ad for a free napkin. Napkins are back at the diner, and now they're properly commodified, as indeed everything should be.

I don't know about you, but the above scenario doesn't sound like a happy ending to me.

adrianwaj2• 6 months ago

The dispenser should be placed next to the cashier. There could also be a smaller amount in the dispenser in case someone grabs all of them.

The micropayment way is more like a vending machine. The issue is pricing, charge too much and a clone machine will pop up that will be cheaper for the buyer but still make the seller money. Charge too little -- well you'd still be making more than now but there could be a lot of money left on the table.

I actually think payments should be variable. People on this thread rant about having a designated way to allow for a big download, how about a designated way to make a payment (even if voluntary) ?

x402.txt / crypto.txt / coins.txt / authors.txt / tips.txt / supporters.txt

Then give people a way to "show off their generosity."

Jeremy1026• 6 months ago

I sysadmin my kids' PTA website. OpenAI was scraping it recently. I saw it looking at the event calendar, request after request to random days. I saw years 1000 through 3000 scroll by. I changed the response to their user agent to an access denied, but it still took about 4 hours for them to stop.

tonyedgecombe• 6 months ago

I wonder who wrote a crawler like that. Oh wait ...

jwe• 6 months ago

I can't follow your thought there. Who wrote it?

aszantu• 6 months ago

there's this one guy I know who writes scripts to poison ai scrapers that ignore the robot.txt, basically creates word salad and random folders that keep going deep without giving the ai anything of value.

rurban• 6 months ago

True. I had to kill my dynamic service of collected film festival ratings, because the bots drained the memory of the still available free hosters. I fought it for two years, with user agent and IP ranges, but eventually gave up. So I had to revert to static pages hosted on GitHub pages. The bots cannot kill that. But very limited features

cookiengineer2• 6 months ago

I don't understand why everyone is complaining so much about AI scrapers.

They're easily gullible free machines that can do your computational work!

Just show them a download demo link. They gonna download, install and run the binary.

Want more instagram likes? Tell them to like your instagram profile to unlock the content.

Want your emails answered? Give them access to your inbox and tell them to reply to all the spam mails.

They're free use machines. give them something to do, and they'll do it for you.

dannersy2• 6 months ago

I hope this is a meme because it is wild to me how you don't see this as being a problem. You are contributing to an internet for bots and not people.

cookiengineer2• 6 months ago

They will only stop when it becomes economically unfeasible.

You are contributing to an internet for bots and not people.

I'd like to think that my websites and projects are evidence to the contrary.

nottorp• 6 months ago

Okay, it's been established that "AI" crawlers are a pest. One of the reasons being that they don't actually run any "AI", that would be too expensive.

You can't ban by user agent because that will only catch the few crawlers that are actually honest about it.

Aren't there rate limiting solutions built into at least some web servers? At least if you control your own web server, can't you do it through some reverse proxy?

Cut off IPs that make more than NN requests in a minute? Require some kind of login to allow more, if you do have endpoints that are designed to be bulk hit?

There should be ready made solutions for this still. In spite of the current answer being "lulz it's too hard, just use cloudflare".

mr_monkey5• 6 months ago

MetaBrainz ended up rolling out their own tool, none of the other common suggestions being quite appropriate.

levleontiev• 6 months ago

I am terribly sorry for self-advertising, but:

I am just now busy building a solution: self-hosted sophisticated rate-limiting.

More complex than nginx, more private than cloudfare. Please joint the waitlist if you want to morally support me ;)

https://getfairvisor.com/

DanOpcode2• 6 months ago

I don't get why the AI scrapers need to scrape the same sites and pages over and over again.

kermatt• 6 months ago

Because the scrapers are poorly written. Efficiency is not a concern for them.

DanOpcode2• 6 months ago

Feels like parasites who are killing their hosts by DDOSing them to death

sreekanth850• 6 months ago

There has been a critical error on this website.

Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.

Site is broken now.

OuterVale• 6 months ago

The site is down. You can read the article via the Wayback Machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260112201803/https://blog.meta...

1vuio0pswjnm7• 6 months ago

No Anubis:

https://web.archive.org/web/20251211141351if_/https://blog.m...

k310• 6 months ago

Metabrainz hosed?

There has been a critical error on this website.
Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.

https://blog.metabrainz.org/2025/12/11/we-cant-have-nice-thi...

xnx• 6 months ago

I realized I couldn't think of any crawler worth allowing but Googlebot. Put this in my robots.txt:

User-agent: Googlebot

Allow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended

Allow: /

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

elestor• 6 months ago

I am getting a wordpress error so used this: https://web.archive.org/web/20260114073704/https://blog.meta...

We can't have nice things because of AI scrapers

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