I mean, you can add their user agent to the robots file but the crawler could just change their user agent or even ignore the robots file if the server isn’t filtering requests by user agent
Or don’t do anything. There are plenty of crawlers out there and disallowing won’t stop the unethical ones.
Just because some people might break into my house doesn’t mean I’ll stop locking my doors.
that doesn’t lock anything, it’s not a security feature.
A house door lock isn’t that much about security either.
It’s a deterrent. Which is a pretty apt comparison for robots.txt and user agent blocking.
Is there some way you could have your web server log who scrapes the site? If you disallow ChatGPT and still find that it has scraped your site would you have cause to sue? @legaleagle (or anyone else too)
It’s gotta be pretty difficult to differentiate human users from bots. If it was easy, you could prevent bots from loading the page altogether.
Exactly what Google are trying to do currently. Just in the worst way possible.
“Please label all of your interesting text so we can flag it with our webcrawler to train on later.”
