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 โŠ› 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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[โ€“] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 2 points 5 days ago

Correct. Google indexing your web page is rate limited for this reason, and you can even include a directive in your robots.txt to specify your own rate limit if you'd like the intervals to be longer (or shorter). The AI scrapers completely ignore your robots.txt. Except, I am certain, for abusing it as if it were a site map. Anything you list there is simply a target you've revealed to them. ("Hey, robots.txt says we shouldn't crawl /foo/bar.html. That means there's a page there! Let's hammer it with 900 page load requests per second!")