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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[–] dgdft@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if the AI chucklefucks are using some manner of malware to route their traffic through botnets these days

Not a conspiracy at all: it’s a whole industry called “resnet proxies” that considerably predates LLMs.

There’s a whole good, bad, and ugly to it; they’re invaluable as a privacy and public-access tool, but also great for blackhats and ticket scalpers. Similarly, the proxy nodes come from a full spectrum of sources ranging from normies getting paid kickbacks to plug a box into their router, to pseudo-ISPs serving ghost clients, to malware farms, and everything in between.