Ask HN: The amount of AI bot traffic is out control?
3•flyingcoder•50m ago
We host a web app which has around 50,000 statically generated public pages, and the amount of bot traffic is insane. Facebook’s crawler requested the same pages over 3 million times in 2 days, and we’ve used Vercel and Cloudflare to block as much as possible but it’s not working. The AI scrapers are routing requests through residential proxies, and even after putting our entire app behind an Auth gate with cloudflare turnstile they’re creating accounts to get access to data that’s meant for humans to read / use. I’ve never seen anything like it before, our hosting costs are up like crazy, and besides all of this, I can’t trust anything I read or see on this web anymore. As a last resort we’ll try switching to hcaptcha tomorrow instead of turnstile which appears to be more difficult but this is all so depressing to me. Want to hear if anyone else is experiencing this, there’s no way I’m the only here who is struggling with sophisticated bots?
Comments
smallerize•13m ago
How do you know it's facebook's crawler if it going through residential proxies?
flyingcoder•4m ago
It had meta in the user-agent headers, it’s trivial to spoof but I’ve read of many others who are seeing the same thing. It’s not just them though, it’s also parallel web systems, and then a bunch of others who aren’t identifying themselves.
smallerize•13m ago
flyingcoder•4m ago