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€“] cout970@programming.dev 2 points 3 days ago

My hypothesis is that those scrappers run on botnets hosted on infected servers, so they want to get the info as fast as possible, since you don't know how long it will last before they are detected and removed.

Another option is that so many servers are scrapping the same web that one server may send only a request every a few seconds, but the whole fleet could be sending thousands of requests per second, some big websites can handle the load, but most small to medium size sites get overwhelmed.