Replies

Oh I know, the hits to my site have increase twenty fold in the last two months. It is like getting hit with a DDoS attack constantly. So here is the situation we are in now. It doesn't look like hosts are going to help us filter it, so we are on our own to set up a defense. The problem is setting it up to allow SEO crawling while still blocking the AI agents. Or ditch the want for SEO altogether and block ALL Bots altogether. I have played with re-configuring robot.txt files. But it is only a "Request" not to crawl your domain. So the only way I found that can indeed block them is to specifically list the known agents in your .htaccess file. There are master lists that are being updated so you can update your own as new ones come out. Here is an example of a current master list: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (\.ai|-ai|_ai|ai\.|ai-|ai_|ai=|AddSearchBot|Agentic|AgentQL|Agent\ 3|Agent\ API|AI\ Agent|AI\ Article\ Writer|AI\ Chat|AI\ Content\ Detector|AI\ Detection|AI\ Dungeon|AI\ Journalist|AI\ Legion) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (AI\ RAG|AI\ Search|AI\ SEO\ Crawler|AI\ Training|AI\ Web|AI\ Writer|AI2|AIBot|aiHitBot|AIMatrix|AISearch|AITraining|Alexa|Alice\ Yandex|AliGenie|AliyunSec|Alpha\ AI|AlphaAI|Amazon|Amelia) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (AndersPinkBot|AndiBot|Anonymous\ AI|Anthropic|AnyPicker|Anyword|Applebot|Aria\ AI|Aria\ Browse|Articoolo|Ask\ AI|AutoGen|AutoGLM|Automated\ Writer|AutoML|Autonomous\ RAG|AwarioRssBot|AwarioSmartBot|AWS\ Trainium|Azure) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (BabyAGI|BabyCatAGI|BardBot|Basic\ RAG|Bedrock|Big\ Sur|Bigsur|Botsonic|Brightbot|Browser\ MCP\ Agent|Browser\ Use|Bytebot|ByteDance|Bytespider|CarynAI|CatBoost|CC-Crawler|CCBot|Chai|Character) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Charstar\ AI|Chatbot|ChatGLM|Chatsonic|ChatUser|Chinchilla|Claude|ClearScope|Clearview|Cognitive\ AI|Cohere|Common\ Crawl|CommonCrawl|Content\ Harmony|Content\ King|Content\ Optimizer|Content\ Samurai|ContentAtScale|ContentBot|Contentedge) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (ContentShake|Conversion\ AI|Copilot|CopyAI|Copymatic|Copyscape|CoreWeave|Corrective\ RAG|Cotoyogi|CRAB|Crawl4AI|CrawlQ\ AI|Crawlspace|Crew\ AI|CrewAI|Crushon\ AI|DALL-E|DarkBard|DataFor|DataProvider) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Datenbank\ Crawler|DeepAI|Deep\ AI|DeepL|DeepMind|Deep\ Research|DeepResearch|DeepSeek|Devin|Diffbot|Doubao\ AI|DuckAssistBot|DuckDuckGo\ Chat|DuckDuckGo-Enhanced|Echobot|Echobox|Elixir|FacebookBot|FacebookExternalHit|Factset) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Falcon|FIRE-1|Firebase|Firecrawl|Flux|Flyriver|Frase\ AI|FriendlyCrawler|Gato|Gemini|Gemma|Gen\ AI|GenAI|Generative|Genspark|Gentoo-chat|Ghostwriter|GigaChat|GLM|GodMode) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Goose|GPT|Grammarly|Grendizer|Grok|GT\ Bot|GTBot|GTP|Hemingway\ Editor|Hetzner|Hugging|Hunyuan|Hybrid\ Search\ RAG|Hypotenuse\ AI|iAsk|ICC-Crawler|ImageGen|ImagesiftBot|img2dataset|imgproxy) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (INK\ Editor|INKforall|Instructor|IntelliSeek|Inferkit|ISSCyberRiskCrawler|Janitor\ AI|Jasper|Jenni\ AI|Julius\ AI|Kafkai|Kaggle|Kangaroo|Keyword\ Density\ AI|Kimi|Knowledge|KomoBot|Kruti|LangChain|Le\ Chat) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Lensa|Lightpanda|LinerBot|LLaMA|LLM|Local\ RAG\ Agent|Lovable|Magistral|magpie-crawler|Manus|MarketMuse|Meltwater|Meta-AI|Meta-External|Meta-Webindexer|Meta\ AI|MetaAI|MetaTagBot|Middleware|Midjourney) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Mini\ AGI|MiniMax|Mintlify|Mistral|Mixtral|model-training|Monica|Narrative|NeevaBot|netEstate|Neural\ Text|NeuralSEO|NinjaAI|NodeZero|Nova\ Act|NovaAct|OAI-SearchBot|OAI\ SearchBot|OASIS|Olivia) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Omgili|Open\ AI|Open\ Interpreter|OpenAGI|OpenAI|OpenBot|OpenPi|OpenRouter|OpenText\ AI|Operator|Outwrite|Page\ Analyzer\ AI|PanguBot|Panscient|Paperlibot|Paraphraser\.io|peer39_crawler|Perflexity|Perplexity|Petal) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Phind|PiplBot|PoeBot|PoeSearchBot|ProWritingAid|Proximic|Puppeteer|Python\ AI|Qualified|Quark|QuillBot|Qopywriter|Qwen|RAG\ Agent|RAG\ Azure\ AI|RAG\ Chatbot|RAG\ Database|RAG\ IS|RAG\ Pipeline|RAG\ Search) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (RAG\ with|RAG-|RAG_|Raptor|React\ Agent|Redis\ AI\ RAG|RobotSpider|Rytr|SaplingAI|SBIntuitionsBot|Scala|Scalenut|Scrap|ScriptBook|Seekr|SEObot|SEO\ Content\ Machine|SEO\ Robot|SemrushBot|Sentibot) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Serper|ShapBot|Sidetrade|Simplified\ AI|Sitefinity|Skydancer|SlickWrite|SmartBot|Sonic|Sora|Spider/2|SpiderCreator|Spin\ Rewrite|Spinbot|Stability|StableDiffusionBot|Sudowrite|SummalyBot|Super\ Agent|Superagent) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (SuperAGI|Surfer\ AI|TerraCotta|Text\ Blaze|TextCortex|Thinkbot|Thordata|TikTokSpider|Timpibot|Tinybird|Together\ AI|Traefik|TurnitinBot|uAgents|VelenPublicWebCrawler|Venus\ Chub\ AI|Vidnami\ AI|Vision\ RAG|WebSurfer|WebText) [NC,OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Webzio|WeChat|Whisper|WordAI|Wordtune|WPBot|Writecream|WriterZen|Writescope|Writesonic|xAI|xBot|YaML|YandexAdditional|YouBot|Zendesk|Zero|Zhipu|Zhuque\ AI|Zimm) [NC] RewriteRule (.*) - [F,L] This site is one of many who provide these master lists. https://perishablepress.com/ultimate-ai-block-list/