Cloudflare develops AI to combat unauthorized web scrapers
- Cloudflare has observed almost one percent of web requests come from AI crawler bots that typically scrape data.
- In response, the company has created an AI tool that generates misleading content to occupy these bots and protect valuable web data.
- This new approach aims to increase operational costs for unauthorized scrapers while enhancing Cloudflare's ability to detect bot activity.
In response to the growing interference of AI crawler bots, Cloudflare has developed a sophisticated bot-busting AI aimed at mitigating unauthorized web data scraping. Observing that nearly one percent of all requests on its network originate from these AI bots—many of which scrape data to train their models—Cloudflare recognized the urgent need to address this issue. Website operators have utilized strategies such as robots.txt files and CAPTCHAs to fend off crawler bots, but many bot operators disregard these measures, leading to excessive traffic that diminishes website performance and infringes on content creators' rights. To specifically target unauthorized scraping, Cloudflare's solution incorporates a generative AI that produces misleading yet believable content within an