How to Protect Your Website From AI Scraping - 56juqingba: How-to instructions you can trust

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Right now, your website might be an all-you-can-eat buffet for hungry AI scrapers tasked with the collection of data for the training of large language models like ChatGPT. If you don’t want your valuable content to become the next AI-generated answer, then you need to protect your website from this new threat to intellectual property.

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How to Prevent Scraping From AI

Protecting your website from AI scraping isn’t as challenging as it might seem. In fact, many of the tried-and-true methods used to combat traditional web scraping are equally effective against their AI-powered counterparts.

1. Configure robots.txt to block specific AI bots

The robots.txt file is your website’s first line of defense against unwanted crawlers, including those that belong to OpenAI and Anthropic. This file is used to implement the Robots Exclusion Protocol and inform well-behaved bots about which parts of your site they’re allowed to access.

Reddit’s robots.txt file

You should be able to find the robots.txt file in the root directory of a website. If it’s not there, then you can create it using any text editor. To block a specific AI bot, you need to write just two lines:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

The first line identifies the bot, and the second line tells it not to access any pages. In the example above, we’re blocking OpenAI’s crawler. Here are the names of some other AI bots you should consider blocking: Google-Extended, Claude-Web, FacebookBot, and anthropic-ai.

2. Implement rate limiting and IP blocking

Cloudflare DNS protection

Rate limiting and IP blocking work by monitoring and controlling the flow of traffic to your website:

Rate limiting sets a cap on how many requests a user (or bot) can make within a specific time frame. If a visitor exceeds this limit, they’re temporarily blocked or their requests are slowed down.
IP blocking, on the other hand, allows you to outright ban specific IP addresses or ranges that you’ve identified as sources of scraping activity.

One of the easiest ways to implement these techniques is by using Cloudflare, a popular content delivery network (CDN) and security service.

Cloudflare sits between your server and the internet at large, where it acts as a protective shield for your website. Once you’ve placed your website behind Cloudflare, you can configure rate limiting rules and manage IP blocks from a user-friendly dashboard.

3. Use CAPTCHAs and other human verification methods

CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are a tried-and-true method for separating human users from bots. These challenges present tasks that are easy for humans but difficult for simple AI scraping bots to solve, such as identifying objects in images or deciphering distorted text.

Demonstration of Google’s reCAPTCHA

One of the most popular and, at the same time, effective CAPTCHAs is Google’s reCAPTCHA. To use it, you need to visit the reCAPTCHA admin console and sign up for an API key pair. Then you can use a WordPress plugin like Advanced Google reCAPTCHA or create a custom implementation based on the official documentation.

4. Employ dynamic content rendering techniques

Another clever way to protect your website from AI scraping is to use dynamic content rendering techniques. The idea is simple but effective: when an AI scraping bot visits your site, it receives valueless content or nothing at all, while regular visitors see the correct, full content.

Example of a website source code

Here’s how it works in practice:

Your server identifies the agent accessing the site, distinguishing between regular users and potential AI bots.
Based on this identification, your server decides what content to serve using JavaScript logic.
For human visitors, the server delivers the full version of your site. For bots, it serves a different set of content.

Since AI scrapers generally don’t process any JavaScript code (only basic HTML content), they have no way of realizing they’ve been fooled.

5. Set up content authentication and gated access

One of the most foolproof ways to protect your content from AI scrapers is to simply put it behind a digital gate. After all, these bots can only harvest what’s publicly accessible.

The simplest form of this protection is requiring users to log in to access certain parts of your website. This alone can deter AI scraper bots, as they typically don’t have the capability to create accounts or authenticate themselves.

MemberPress plugin

For those looking to take things a step further, putting some or all of your content behind a paywall can provide even stronger protection. WordPress users, for instance, can easily implement this using plugins like MemberPress.

Of course, you need to strike a balance between protection and accessibility. Not all visitors may be willing to create an account just to access your content, let alone pay for it. The viability of this approach depends entirely on the nature of your content and your audience’s expectations.

6. Watermark or poison your images

Digital watermarking is a classic technique for protecting intellectual property, but it’s evolving to meet the challenges of the AI age. One emerging technique in this space is data poisoning, which involves making subtle changes to your content that are imperceptible to humans but can confuse or disrupt AI systems trying to scrape or analyze it.

Tools like Glaze can alter images in ways that make them difficult for AI models to process accurately, while still looking normal to human viewers. There’s also Nightshade, which takes data poisoning a step further by actively interfering with AI training.

Examples of Nightshade image poisoning

By introducing tiny alterations to images, Nightshare can “break” the assumptions AI models make during training. If an AI system tries to learn from these poisoned images, it may struggle to generate accurate representations.

Theoretically, if your content is well-watermarked or poisoned, it may still get scraped, but AI companies will be less likely to include it in their training data. They may even actively avoid scraping from your site in the future to prevent contaminating their datasets.

7. Take advantage of DMCA takedown notices and copyright laws

While the previous methods focus on preventing AI scraping using technical measures, sometimes it’s best to take a different approach by taking advantage of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices and copyright laws.

If you discover that your content has been scraped and is being used without permission, you can issue a DMCA takedown notice. This is a formal request to have your copyrighted material removed from a website or platform.

Sample DMCA takedown notice letter

In case your DMCA takedown notices aren’t honored (and you better be prepared that they won’t), you can escalate by filing a lawsuit, and you wouldn’t be the first one to do so.

OpenAI and Microsoft are currently being sued for copyright violations by the Center for Investigative Reporting, along with several other news organizations. These lawsuits allege that AI companies are using copyrighted content without permission or compensation to train their models. While the outcome of these cases is yet to be determined, they pave the path for others to follow.

Cover image created using DALL-E. All screenshots by David Morelo.

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David Morelo –
Staff Writer

David Morelo is a professional content writer in the technology niche, covering everything from consumer products to emerging technologies and their cross-industry application. His interest in technology started at an early age and has only grown stronger over the years.