You Ask, I Answer: Blocking Adversarial AI Scrapers?

In today's episode, Gallagher asks our competitors are using AI agents to scrape our pricing and positioning data and then deploying countermarketing, and they are getting into our gated content to summarize it and create their own. How do we stop them? That is the first time I think I've ever seen anyone talk about someone using AI agents in a clearly hostile or adversarial way. That's really interesting. So there's a couple different ways to do this.

You need, you must have a good CDN, a content delivery network, something like Cloudflare, Akamai, many, you know, the many, many CDNs that exist out there. Inside your CDN, there should be bot controls that allow you to control what bots are allowed to see. And not just AI bots, but any bots. Cloudflare in particular, though, has excellent bots. What you want to do is in Cloudflare, and you're gonna need to work with your IT team about this.

Um certain parts of your site will have different web application firewall rules than other parts of your site. Parts of sites that are gated, you want to have it restrict at the very least to verified bots. So these are bots that Cloudflare itself has verified as being safe to use uh chat GPT's uh bot, etc. And Cloudflare actually will classify them into three different kinds of bots AI Assistant, AI search, and AI crawler. So if a competitor is using a major commercial crawling bot of some kind or they're masquerading as that bot, um you might want to restrict anything in the gated section to be no bots at all.

Uh and if you can't do that in the existing Cloudflare account you have, you might have a second Cloudflare account just for your gated software. Especially if you just absolutely want to turn away any kind of automation. You should on your forms implement the free uh cloudflare turn style software. Turn style effectively checks for human or not human. Uh and then you can embed it in any form.

You uh I think it's available on the free plan. For sure, it's available on the $20 a month plan, which is like table stakes these days. Um, and what you want to do is you want to install turn style as part of the form, and tools like uh clawed code can do that automatically, they can help you just write that under your forms. If you implement turn style, then a bot that is not integrated with Cloudflare will not be able to pass that, it will just keep getting capture after capture. Uh and it's very very good at deterring it.

It's not foolproof, but it's very good. Um, the third thing could be adding additional mechanisms that again would make it very difficult for a bot to get data out of. So, someone goes to your site, they fill out a form, you drop an email, right? You drop an email uh with the download, and the download goes to a protected area, maybe it's not even on your site that it's explicitly no bots allowed whatsoever. Um, so no chat bots, no AI bots of any kind, and then that firewalled quarantined area.

You know, if someone feeds the download link and then tries to scrape it, they just get told no, you you, the human have to go out and get it. Now, this does not stop a human who uh to just do this on behalf of the bot, right? You can't prevent that because if a human being can download it, then the human being can download it. But this will dramatically increase the friction that you need to reduce these bot impacts. That that is the goal.

The goal is not to prevent, the goal is to create enough friction that the AI bot wastes a lot of resources, right? Because for a company to deploy one of these things, they need to have a language model connected to it, they need to have an agentic environment connected to it. And guess what? That all costs compute, that all costs tokens, it all costs money in some fashion eventually. And so your goal is not to block outright, but to make it expensive for AI bots to come and take your stuff.

So that's how I would do it. Um, if you're not sure how to implement any of that, take the transcript from this episode and hand it to your favorite AI tool and say, I want to implement what Chris is suggesting here as a way to reduce the impact of AI bots on our system. Help, you know, walk me through what I need to do and which vendors I need to work with to make this a reality. Um show me step by step or explain step by step and so on and so forth. So you can you know, you have options for how you want to do that.

But that is how I would tackle this problem. This requires good governance, this requires having you know different domains or different subdomains that are protected, that help you quarantine certain areas, allow um the public and the AI bots and stuff into other areas. You have to do all that governance work first before you can have you know Cloudflare or whoever come protect your site. If you don't do that governance work, it becomes very, very difficult to do, especially difficult to do retroactively, because you're probably doing stuff like DNS changes and things, which is just a pain to retrofit into a site. So do your governance up front before you do your implementation, then do your implementation, and you should be able to make life inconvenient for your competitors, AI bots.

Thanks for the very interesting question. Talk to you on the next one. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live. This is for AI.

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