this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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Explain Like I'm Five

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ELI5: Why do AI web scrapers take down sites? (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by IndigoGollum@lemmy.world to c/explainlikeimfive@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] emb@lemmy.world 21 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Non-expert here, so conjecture warning.

Loading the info from the page once is fine for training one LLM at one point in time. But there are a bunch of different companies and people doing that, and they probably keep doing it again because they want newer information.

And training is only one aspect of AI scrapers. You also have agents constantly doing websearches and summarizing, synthesizing the info at user request, all day every day.

[–] SparroHawc@piefed.world 10 points 4 days ago

Let's not forget that the LLM scrapers refuse to follow the protocols that are already set out for scrapers to be able to reasonably get the content they want.