Block? Nope, robots.txt does not block the bots. It’s just a text file that says: “Hey robot X, please do not crawl my website. Thanks :>”
I disallow a page in my robots.txt and ip-ban everyone who goes there. Thats pretty effective.
humans typically don’t visit [website]/fdfjsidfjsidojfi43j435345 when there’s no button that links to it
Imagine posting a rule that says “do not walk on the grass” among other rules and then banning anyone who steps on the grass with the thought process that if they didn’t obey that rule they were likely disobeying other rules. Except the grass is somewhere that no one would see unless they actually read the rules. The rules were the only place that mentioned that grass.
Is the page linked in the site anywhere, or just mentioned in the robots.txt file?
Not sure if that is effective at all. Why would a crawler check the robots.txt if it’s programmed to ignore it anyways?
Unfortunate indeed.
“Can AI bots ignore my robots.txt file? Well-established companies such as Google and OpenAI typically adhere to robots.txt protocols. But some poorly designed AI bots will ignore your robots.txt.”
typically adhere. but they don’t have to follow it.
poorly designed AI bots
Is it a poor design if its explicitly a design choice to ignore it entirely to scrape as much data as possible? Id argue its more AI bots designed to scrape everything regardless of robots.txt. That’s the intention. Asshole design vs poor design.
This is why I block in a htaccess:
# Bot Agent Block Rule
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (BOTNAME|BOTNAME2|BOTNAME3) [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) - [F,L]
This is still relying on the bot being nice enough to tell you that it’s a bot; it could just not.
Exactly. The only truly effectively way I’ve ever found to block bots is to use a service like Akamai. They have an add-on called Bot Manager that identifies requests as bots in real time. They have a library of over 1000 known bots and can also identify unknown bots built on different frameworks, bots that impersonate well known bots like Googlebot, etc. This service is expensive, but effective…