[noxvilleza]

Most well-known/large agentic web tools I've seen are actually super honest about who they are -- even when they write out scripts they're very keen to identify themselves using user-agents. Most of the time those tools are fine - it's the ones that happen to have a random choice of the 5 most common Chrome/Firefox user-agents making sequential scrapes but cycling through IPs on African and South American residential IPs that are the problem!

[TurdF3rguson]

Yes I've seen it. ClaudeBot will gleefully announce itself when it hammers my niche website a million times a day.

[noxvilleza]

At least those bots are easy to block though. I run a niche stats website for an esport and I have no idea why there's loads of residential trawlers/botnets with 10k+ IPs trying to get that data - most of what they scrape is directly available from Valve's APIs.

[TurdF3rguson]

> I have no idea why there's loads of residential trawlers/botnets with 10k+ IPs trying to get that data

Probably as simple as the fact that there are unmetered residential proxy plans, which means once you're already paying for one, there's no reason not to use it for everything.

[inigyou]

If you block it, it comes back with a residential proxy network and headless Chrome. Better not to block based on the obvious signs.

[solid_fuel]

Blocking is too obvious. I would prefer to feed back false information but only to LLM crawlers.

[pixelesque]

Semi-off-topic but...

On my sites, I see ClaudeBot consistently (and has been like this for over a year) ask for "${SITE}.com/base_dir1" and then get the redirect (Caddy does this automatically) to get "${SITE}.com/base1/base_dir1/" (trailing slash).

The hrefs on my sites include the trailing slashes for directories, so looks like ClaudeBot's internal code is stripping them off before requesting them, and therefore essentially makes almost 2x the requests to my sites for directories, half of them ending up being redirects back to the same url but with the trailing slash.