I’d link to some blog posts about this an example, but the site they’re from went down a while ago.
At risk of giving anyone ideas, why do LLM training scrapers request pages from sites millions of times per day instead of just doing the equivalent of wget -r https://example.com/ ? If the point is just stealing things people have written, what do they accomplish by wasting a web host’s resources beyond being an ⊛ to webmasters?
Edit: Let me elaborate. A lot of the answers i’m seeing are just restating the problem without explaining why LLM scrapers are apparently all either coded by idiots or assholes. I know that they’re hitting sites with unreasonable numbers of requests, wasting bandwidth, and making tools like Anubis too important. I know that’s what’s happening. I’m asking why. What they gain from not being even a little intelligent about this.
With all the money and effort (and maybe even brainpower) going into this, surely there’s some explanation beyond incompetence.
While this is idiotic and counter productive long term, the thing to remember, it’s not just one scraper, it’s hundreds of them, simultaneously trying to outscrape the other, each trying to hoover up as much as possible as fast as possible.
If that’s not enough, the Facebook scrapers hit the same URL over and over again, even when that URL returns an error. Their approach to web scraping is essentially: “Fuck you, deal with it”, even if the website is run by a small business that cannot financially justify more bandwidth or server capacity.
I’ve seen this process bring sites down, to the point of actively having to block all non-human requests, just to be able to serve customers. This of course doesn’t work long term because the bots continue to probe and morph.