Stop AI from Crawling Your Site’s Content
While this site specializes in AI News and AI Output, it’s also incredibly important to know that AI DOES NOT HAVE to scrape your site and its content. You DO NOT have to sit back and feel as if your content is going to be used against your will.
This page is a HOW TO guide to safeguard your site and content against scraping.
Where to begin?
robots.txt is your friend. So are http headers
robots.txt
This file, placed at the root of your site, gives commands to bots of all kinds. It is commonly used to disallow certain types of content scraping
http headers
This is a term to talk about the ‘end result’ of telling bots what they cannot do with your content. There are quite a few different ways to approach this.
Each approach is unique to the setup of your systems and how they deliver content to the site or product.
robots.txt content example:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /path-to-block/
HTTP Header example:
X-Robots-Tag: noindex, nofollow
Other methods
You could take additional security measures.
- IP Blocking: Block known scraper IP addresses.
- CAPTCHAs: Use CAPTCHAs to prevent automated access.
- Rate Limiting: Limit the number of requests from a single IP address within a certain time frame.
- Bot Detection Services: Implement services that detect and block bots.
- JavaScript: Serve some content dynamically using JavaScript, which can make it harder for basic scrapers to extract content.