Mastodawn

AI companies are violating a basic social contract of the web and and ignoring robots.txt

Put something in robots.txt that isn't supposed to be hit and is hard to hit by non-robots. Log and ban all IPs that hit it.

Imperfect, but can't think of a better solution.

robots.txt is purely textual; you can't run JavaScript or log anything. Plus, one who doesn't intend to follow robots.txt wouldn't query it.

If it doesn’t get queried that’s the fault of the webscraper. You don’t need JS built into the robots.txt file either. Just add some line like:

here-there-be-dragons.html

Any client that hits that page (and maybe doesn’t pass a captcha check) gets banned. Or even better, they get a long stream of nonsense.

I actually love the data-poisoning approach. I think that sort of strategy is going to be an unfortunately necessary part of the future of the web.