If you have a site with valuable content the LLM crawlers hound you to no end. CF is basically a protection racket at this point for many sites. It doesnt even stop the more determined ones but it keeps some away.
And they're pretty tame as far as computer fraud goes - if my device gets compromised I'd much rather deal with it being used for fake YouTube views than ransomware or a banking trojan.
"The internet sucks", yes, but we're doing it to ourselves.
LLMs aren't going anywhere, but the world would be a better place if they hadn't been developed. Even if they had more positive impacts, those would not outweigh the massive environmental degradation they are causing or the massive disincentive they created against researching other, more useful forms of AI.
LLMs have become a crucial compendium of knowledge, that had become hidden behind SEO
A solid secondary option is making LLM scraping for training opt-in, and/or compensating sites that were/are scraped for training data. Hell, maybe then you could not knock websites over incentivizing them to use Cloudflare in the first place.
But that means LLM researchers have to respect other people's IP which hasn't been high on their todo lists as yet.
bUt ThAT dOeSn'T sCaLe - not my fuckin problem chief. If you as an LLM developer are finding your IP banned or you as a web user are sick of doing "prove you're human" challenges, it isn't the website's fault. They're trying to control costs being arbitrarily put onto them by a disinterested 3rd party who feels entitled to their content, which it costs them money to deliver. Blame the asshole scraping sites left and right.
Edit: and you wouldn't even need to go THAT far. I scrape a whole bunch of sites for some tools I built and a homemade news aggregator. My IP has never been flagged because I keep the number of requests down wherever possible, and rate-limit them so it's more in line with human like browsing. Like so much of this could be solved with basic fucking courtesy.
Most of the problems on the internet in 2025 aren't because of one particular technology. They're because the modern web was based on gentleman's agreements and handshakes, and since those things have now gotten in the way of exponential profit increases on behalf of a few Stanford dropouts, they're being ignored writ large.
CF being down wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal if their service wasn't one of the main ways to protect against LLM crawlers that blatantly ignore robots.txt and other long-established means to control automated extraction of web content. But, well, it is one of the main ways.
Would it be one of the main ways to protect against LLM web scraping if we investigated one of the LLM startups for what is arguably a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, arrested their C-suite, and sent each member to a medium-security federal prison (I don't know, maybe Leavenworth?) for multiple years after a fair trial?
Probably not.
It is the Web that is being degraded
The site doesn't even need to have valuable content. Any content at all.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/11/apple-introduces-digi...
That's a problem caused by bots and spammers and DDoSers, that Cloudflare is trying to alleviate.
And you generally don't have to prove it over and over again unless there's a high-risk signal associated with you, like you're using a VPN or have cookies disabled, etc. Which are great for protecting your privacy, but then obviously privacy means you do have to keep demonstrating you're not a bot.
That they're trying counts for brownie points, it's not an excuse to be satisfied with something that still bothers a lot of people. Do better, CloudFlare.
If you have any ideas on how to protect against bad actors in a way that is just as effective but easier for users, please share it.
Because as far as I can tell, this isn't a question of effort. It's a question of fundamental technological limitations.
If you have a better technological solution, we'd all love to know it. Because right now, site owners are using the best tools available.
Criticizing when there's no other solution isn't very useful, is it?
Cloudflare is the multi-billion dollar corporation. It has everything to do with that, because they are the primary cause, and their resources and position make them by far the best equipped to solve it.
> Criticizing when there's no other solution isn't very useful, is it?
Of course it is. Without criticism, the growing problem goes unacknowledged and allowed to persist. It should instead be continually called out until it is prioritized, and some of those billions should be spent on researching a solution. (Similarly, a company found to be dumping waste into a river should be held responsible for cleaning up the mess they created. Even if that turns out to be expensive or difficult.)
Expecting a single affected person to solve it for the big corp that caused it is unrealistic. And blaming the victims because they use VPNs or disable cookies is... unhelpful.
CloudFlare is protecting sites from DDoS attacks and out-of-control bots. They're not the ones causing them. If CloudFlare wasn't asking you to prove you're human, many times the site would be down entirely because it couldn't keep up. Or the site would simply shut down because it couldn't afford it.
And this isn't a question of spending some fraction of billions on researching a solution. There fundamentally isn't one, if you understand how the internet works. This is a problem a lot of people would like to solve better, believe me.
So, yes, criticizing Cloudflare here is as useful as criticizing it for not having faster-than-light communication. There's nothing else it can do. It's not "blaming the victims".
I'm going to assume you simply don't have the technical understanding of how the internet works. Because the position you're taking is simply absurd and nonsensical, and there's no way you would write what you're writing otherwise.
I.e., if you use Tor for "normie sites", then the fact that someone can be seen using Tor is no longer a reliable proxy for detecting them trying to see/do something confidential and it becomes harder to identify & target journalists, etc. just because they're using Tor.
But we can all say thank you to all the AI crawlers who hammer websites with impossible traffic.