Blocking AI crawlers with Caddy
I was reading the reddit thread on Claude AI crawlers effectively DDOSing Linux Mint forums https://libreddit.lunar.icu/r/linux/comments/1ceco4f/claude_ai_name_and_shame/
and I wanted to block all ai crawlers from my selfhosted stuff.
I don't trust crawlers to respect the Robots.txt but you can get one here: https://darkvisitors.com/
Since I use Caddy as a Server, I generated a directive that blocks them based on their useragent. The content of the regex basically comes from darkvisitors.
Sidenote - there is a module for blocking crawlers as well, but it seemed overkill for me https://github.com/Xumeiquer/nobots
For anybody who is interested, here is the block_ai_crawlers.conf I wrote.
(blockAiCrawlers) {
@blockAiCrawlers {
header_regexp User-Agent "(?i)(Bytespider|CCBot|Diffbot|FacebookBot|Google-Extended|GPTBot|omgili|anthropic-ai|Claude-Web|ClaudeBot|cohere-ai)"
}
handle @blockAiCrawlers {
abort
}
}
# Usage:
# 1. Place this file next to your Caddyfile
# 2. Edit your Caddyfile as in the example below
#
# ```
# import block_ai_crawlers.conf
#
# www.mywebsite.com {
# import blockAiCrawlers
# reverse_proxy * localhost:3000
# }
# ```