Have you ever checked your web traffic logs and wondered who all those mysterious visitors are? It turns out that a huge chunk of what looks like legitimate traffic is actually automated scrapers, literally bots armed with ever-smarter AI to vacuum up your articles, images, and even your readers and employees’ email addresses.
A simple robots.txt file and basic rate limits cannot handle them. Today’s scrapers spin through thousands of IP addresses and mimic real human browsing so convincingly that basic defenses can’t tell them apart from genuine users.
Content Scrapers 1.0: Old-School Tactics
Have you ever checked your web traffic logs and wondered who all those mysterious visitors are? It turns out that a huge chunk of what looks like legitimate traffic is actually automated scrapers, literally bots armed with ever-smarter AI to vacuum up your articles, images, and even your readers and employees’ email addresses.
