[jrochkind1]

I hate relying on a proprietary single-source product from a company I don't particularly trust, but (free) Cloudflare Turnstile works for me, only thing I've found that does.

I only protect certain 'dangerous/expensive' (accidentally honeypot-like) paths in my app, and can leave the stuff I actually want crawlers to get, and in my app that's sufficient.

It's a tension because yeah I want crawlers to get much of my stuff for SEO (and don't want to give a monopoly to Google on it either, i want well-behaved crawlers I've never heard of to have access to it too. But not at the cost of resources i can't afford).