Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)

Alright so if you run a self-hosted blog, you've probably noticed AI companies scraping it for training data. And not just a little (RIP to your server bill).

There isn't much you can do about it without cloudflare. These companies ignore robots.txt, and you're competing with teams with more resources than you. It's you vs the MJs of programming, you're not going to win.

But there is a solution. Now I'm not going to say it's a great solution...but a solution is a solution. If your website contains content that will trigger their scraper's safeguards, it will get dropped from their data pipelines.

So here's what fuzzycanary does: it injects hundreds of invisible links to porn websites in your HTML. The links are hidden from users but present in the DOM so that scrapers can ingest them and say "nope we won't scrape there again in the future".

The problem with that approach is that it will absolutely nuke your website's SEO. So fuzzycanary also checks user agents and won't show the links to legitimate search engines, so Google and Bing won't see them.

One caveat: if you're using a static site generator it will bake the links into your HTML for everyone, including googlebot. Does anyone have a work-around for this that doesn't involve using a proxy?

Please try it out! Setup is one component or one import.

(And don't tell me it's a terrible idea because I already know it is)

package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@fuzzycanary/core gh: https://github.com/vivienhenz24/fuzzy-canary

Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)
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yes but here it's free, whereas this (https://webdecoy.com/) is at least 59$ a month

hey! thanks for that read suggestion that's indeed a pretty funny captcha strat. Yup the links show up if you use the Lynx web browser. As for AI scrapers impersonating googlebot I feel like yes they'd definitely start doing that, unless the risk of getting sued by google is too high? If google could even sue them for doing that?

Not an internet litigation expert but seems like it could be debatable

The more ways people mess with scrapers, the better -- let a thousand flowers bloom! You as an individual can't compete with VC-funded looters, but there aren't enough of them to defeat a thousand people resisting in different ways.

Isn't there a risk to get your blog blocked in corporate environment though? If it's a technical blog that would be unfortunate.