Bot Management & Scraping

The New Bot Landscape

With the explosion of LLMs, web traffic is increasingly automated. However, not all bots are created equal. It is crucial to differentiate between:

1. Legitimate AI Crawlers: Operated by known entities (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google). They identify themselves via User-Agent, respect robots.txt, and provide value by bringing visibility to your brand in LLM responses.
2. Abusive Scrapers: Unidentified bots that steal content to train private models or scrape data without attribution, often ignoring robots.txt and overwhelming your servers.

Strategies for Bot Management

1. Granular robots.txt

Do not block all bots blindly. explicitly allow the agents you want to interact with, while blocking known bad actors or generic scraping frameworks.

2. User-Agent and IP Verification

Legitimate crawlers publish the IP ranges they use. You can cross-reference the User-Agent string with a reverse DNS lookup or an official IP list to ensure the bot isn't spoofing its identity.

3. Rate Limiting at the Edge

Implement rate limiting at your CDN or WAF level (e.g., Cloudflare) to prevent any single IP from requesting hundreds of pages per second, regardless of whether they claim to be a legitimate bot.

4. Honeypots

Use hidden links or fields in your HTML (honeypots) that only a bot would interact with. If a bot triggers the honeypot, you can safely block its IP.

Cloudflare offers a dedicated feature for this: AI Labyrinth. It automatically adds invisible links with nofollow tags to your pages. Abusive crawlers that ignore robots.txt get trapped in a maze of endless links, while legitimate bots — which respect no-crawl instructions — safely ignore them. Trapped bot details are recorded and shared across all Cloudflare customers. Enable it from Security → Bots → Configure Bot Fight Mode → AI Labyrinth in the Cloudflare dashboard, with zero code changes required.

The GEO Balance

The core of Generative Engine Optimization is making your site accessible to AI. Aggressive bot protection (like CAPTCHAs on every page) will completely break your GEO efforts. The goal is to let the "good bots" in effortlessly while keeping the "bad bots" out.