Webmaster It's time to serve slop to AI crawlers
The challenges of hosting a website in 2026 are increasing due to frequent updates and the impact of AI crawlers. These crawlers generate excessive requests that can disrupt website functionality. To counteract this, some webmasters are creatively serving misleading or nonsensical data to these bots to hinder their training processes.
- ▪Webmasters are facing difficulties with frequent updates and AI crawlers causing excessive requests.
- ▪Some webmasters are serving misleading data to AI crawlers to disrupt their training.
- ▪The article discusses the use of gzip bombs and nonsensical data as tactics against unwanted bot traffic.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 3,312 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | iczelia |
| Canonical URL | https://iczelia.net/blog/webmaster-it-s-time-to-serve-slop-to-ai-crawlers/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 18:46:38 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T18:48:02.507Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T18:48:02.507Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | PvYlQBkpysYJ |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Hosting a website in 2026 is a huge pain in the ass. Not only you have to update your whole system every other day because someone found more RCEs in nginx, the AI labs are also looking to kill your website through a million of tiny cuts. This week alone, Meta's and Anthropic's bots have caused insurmountable waves of completely pointless requests that hammer static endpoints over and over. Most bots also don't respect robots.txt.My hobby for messing with crawlers started in 2021 when a deluge of WordPress vulnerability scanners were hitting my non-existent /wp-admin/ non-stop. The solution that I opted in for was blocking these two paths in robots.txt.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at iczelia.
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