AI crawlers run up a website's hosting bill

Easier said than done.

  • You can use robots.txt, but only well-behaved robots will respect that
  • You can block IP ranges, which will only work with crawlers you know of, for a while.
  • You can block domains. Same problem.

What I’ve done is set pretty strict throttles on traffic. If you hit more than 60 pages in a minute, you’re kicked out for 6 hours.

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