Trap bots on your server

Sick of AI scrapers ignoring robots.txt and hammering your server? Maurycy built a Markov chain-based crawler trap that generates infinite nonsensical content to exhaust bot resources, with each page linking to five more garbage pages for exponential queue growth. His follow-up post explains the economics: serving dynamically generated gibberish costs only ~60 CPU microseconds per request, making it cheaper than serving real content while the bots waste their bandwidth on procedurally generated nonsense. The idea has company: Nepenthes drip-feeds Markov babble to LLM crawlers through endless self-linking pages, and its author warns of continuous CPU load and of your site disappearing from search results. Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth has offered the same trick as a one-click toggle since March 2025, serving hidden pages of generated, factual but irrelevant content only to suspected scrapers. Pro tip: CPU and RAM are faster than network, so let’s feed the bots until they explode.