Webmaster It's time to serve slop to AI crawlers
The challenges of hosting a website in 2026 are increasing due to frequent updates and the impact of AI crawlers. These crawlers generate excessive requests that can disrupt website functionality. To counteract this, some webmasters are creatively serving misleading or nonsensical data to these bots to hinder their training processes.
- ▪Webmasters are facing difficulties with frequent updates and AI crawlers causing excessive requests.
- ▪Some webmasters are serving misleading data to AI crawlers to disrupt their training.
- ▪The article discusses the use of gzip bombs and nonsensical data as tactics against unwanted bot traffic.
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Hosting a website in 2026 is a huge pain in the ass. Not only you have to update your whole system every other day because someone found more RCEs in nginx, the AI labs are also looking to kill your website through a million of tiny cuts. This week alone, Meta's and Anthropic's bots have caused insurmountable waves of completely pointless requests that hammer static endpoints over and over. Most bots also don't respect robots.txt.My hobby for messing with crawlers started in 2021 when a deluge of WordPress vulnerability scanners were hitting my non-existent /wp-admin/ non-stop. The solution that I opted in for was blocking these two paths in robots.txt.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at iczelia.
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