This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
They're framing it as "AI haters" instead of what it actually is, which is people who do not like that robots have been programmed to completely ignore the robots.txt files on a website.
No AI system in the world would get stuck in this if it simply obeyed the robots.txt files.
The disingenuous phrasing is like "pro life" instead of what it is, "anti-choice"
Waiting for Apache or Nginx to import a robots.txt and send crawlers down a rabbit hole instead of trusting them.
The internet being what it is, I'd be more surprised if there wasn't already a website set up somewhere with a malicious robots.txt file to screw over ANY crawler regardless of providence.
I hope it's effective.
AI crawlers and sending them down an "infinite maze" of static files with no exit links, where they "get stuck"
Maybe against bad crawlers. If you know what you're trying to look for and just just trying to grab anything and everything this should not be very effective. Any good web crawler has limits. This seems to be targeted. This seems to be targeted at Facebooks apparently very dumb web crawler.
Yeah I was just thinking... this is not at all how the tools work.
Any good web crawler has limits.
Yeah. Like, literally just:
What kind of lazy-ass crawler doesn't even do that?
It might be initially, but they'll figure out a way around it soon enough.
Remember those articles about "poisoning" images? Didn't get very far on that either
The way to get around it is respecting robots.txt lol
But that's not respecting the shareholders 😤
This kind of stuff has always been an endless war of escalation, the same as any kind of security. There was a period of time where all it took to mess with Gen AI was artists uploading images of large circles or something with random tags to their social media accounts. People ended up with random bits of stop signs and stuff in their generated images for like a week. Now, artists are moving to sites that treat AI scrapers like malware attacks and degrading the quality of the images that they upload.
The poisoned images work very well. We just haven't hit the problem yet, because a) not many people are poisoning their images yet and b) training data sets were cut off at 2021, before poison pills were created.
But, the easy way to get around this is to respect web standards, like robots.txt
It's not. If it was, every search engine out there would be belly up at the first nested link.
Google/Bing just consume their own crawling traffic. You don't want to NOT show up in search queries right?
It's unclear how much damage tarpits or other AI attacks can ultimately do. Last May, Laxmi Korada, Microsoft's director of partner technology, published a report detailing how leading AI companies were coping with poisoning, one of the earliest AI defense tactics deployed. He noted that all companies have developed poisoning countermeasures, while OpenAI "has been quite vigilant" and excels at detecting the "first signs of data poisoning attempts."
Despite these efforts, he concluded that data poisoning was "a serious threat to machine learning models." And in 2025, tarpitting represents a new threat, potentially increasing the costs of fresh data at a moment when AI companies are heavily investing and competing to innovate quickly while rarely turning significant profits.
"A link to a Nepenthes location from your site will flood out valid URLs within your site's domain name, making it unlikely the crawler will access real content," a Nepenthes explainer reads.
Same problems with tarpitting. They search engines are doing the crawling for each of their own companies, you don't want to poison your own search results.
Conceptually, they'll stop being search crawls altogether and if you expect to get any traffic it'll come from AI crawls :/
You don’t want to NOT show up in search queries right?
At this point?
I am fully ok NOT being in search engines for any of my sites. Organic traffic has always been much more valuable than inorganic traffic.
Good
I am so gonna deploy this. I want the crawlers to index the entire Mandelbrot set.
I'll train with with lyrics from Beck Hansen and Smash Mouth so that none of it makes sense.
This is the song that never ends.
It goes on and on my friends.
Well the hits start coming and they dont start ending
Notice how it's "AI haters" and not "people trying to protect their IP" as it would be if it were say...China instead of AI companies stealing the IP.
why bother wasting resources with the infinite maze and just do what the old school .htaccess bot-traps do; ban any IP that hits the nono-zone defined in robots.txt?
That's the reason for the maze. These companies have multiple IP addresses and bots that communicate with each other.
They can go through multiple entries in the robot.txt file. Once they learn they are banned, they go scrape the old fashioned way with another IP address.
But if you create a maze, they just continually scrape useless data, rather than scraping data you don't want them to get.
if they are stupid and scrape serially. the AI can have one "thread" caught in the tar while other "threads" continues to steal your content.
with a ban they would have to keep track of what banned them to not hit it again and get yet another of their IP range banned.
Banning IP ranges isn't going to work. A lot of these companies rent out home IP addresses.
Also the point isn't just protecting content, it's data poisoning.
if they are stupid and scrape serially. the AI can have one “thread” caught in the tar while other “threads” continues to steal your content.
Why would it be only one thread stuck in the tarpit? If the tarpit maze has more than one choice (like a forked road) then the AI would have to spawn another thread to follow that path, yes? Then another thread would be spawned at the next fork in the road. Ad infinitum until the AI stops spawning threads or exhausts the resources of the web server (a DOS).
Revenge
Oh I love this!
Does it also trap search engine crawlers? That would be a problem
The big search engine crawlers like googles or Microsoft's should respect your robots.txt file. This trick affects those who don't honor the file and just scrape your website even if you told it not to
I imagine if those obey the robots.txt thing that it’s not a problem.
Don't make me tap the sign
