It’s also a “you can’t scrape us but we can scrape you” mentality these companies are getting into.
It really sucks for small businesses. Their websites get absolutely hammered and they can’t afford or don’t know how to stop it. Cloudflare ends up winning as they’re the easiest solution.
It's a cognitive tax on all the parties involved. It works on buyers (websites that pay for it) much the way that llm's work on their users, by working up to the point at which the buyers can't discern it working.
As a user (bot or flesh) you have to jump through these hoops, and to the website operators they get fewer complaints when users (and bots) are able to contort themselves in predictable ways. Versus you'd perceive as a website operator, if your blocking worked at all, that you'd risk seeing a precipitous dropoff of bots if you did things in bespoke ways, as both bots (true positives, among dd and cf survivors) and people (false positives) get jammed.
The net effect in this model would be that such things as cloudflare and datadome take money from websites in order to block "dumb" bots and enfranchise "smart" bots to the point of creating a market for bot services. People that want to bot have to use AI or go to bot service providers.
For website operators that's a worthwhile exchange for dollars, in that dumb bots can cause a lot of harm in wasted compute. Bots are typically dead end users who won't buy ever anyway, or merely inefficient way of doing business if they scrape excessively. And many do scrape excessively.
"reform school for bots" is a good mental model. For this to work, the "reforms" have to be consistent so that bots can conform to them.
It's a peculiar equilibrium and I am not sure that it's all that stable as an equilibrium. Would be a good subject for a formal treatment, game theory and economics.
Cloudflare is probably one of the most popular, reasonably priced for general public. You have fastly, akamai, cloudfront as other proxy providers and CDNs with similar capability but higher price point mostly catering to enterprise customers.
Bunny.net is another one that I find similar to Cloudflare from pricing and functionality perspective
TikTok, Instagram, X, etc. These platforms will host you for free and will distribute updates to people, including potential customers via the algorithm.
Funny that I can't barely access any of those just because I don't have an account. Plus Facebook. They show me almost nothing and push their shitty app to nausea. And I am sure the "site" owners get zero info on how many clients they are losing for being behind that fence.
Does it suck if you offer a product and someone’s looking for it and the agent can’t look on Amazon but they can look on your small side maybe that’s good
Legit what one of our clients problem was. Normal web traffic wasn’t an issue and the logs were just a few megs. Yeah there was a problem where they were not rotating but once meta started crawling them 24/7 ignoring the robots.txt it kept filling their vps up. An annoying problem to fix once a server is completely full and you can’t even ssh in.
30GB a month isn't too terrible? I guess it depends - for example my provider includes 10TB egress per month, so 30gb would be negligible if it's static content. I'm not sure what others do, but I often click on the links that the agents pull up as sources so the websites do get more discoverable.
What really sucks is e.g. Gemini that pulls images without being able to go to the source (unless it changed recently.)
That's perfectly fine by me. I'll read those arguments and buy those things my agents can find on the open web; which is plenty.
Want to argue for a shining new world, but you're on a locked site? I guess we'll have to live with dystopia. Want to sell the greatest widget since the invention of sliced bread? Well, I never found it. Sorry, I bought inferior widgets from your competitor instead. I'm at a physical sales location, but I can't access your spec-sheets? Your competitor the next shelf over doesn't have that problem, I'll go buy theirs.
Exactly. Shut yourself off, you get shut off. I don’t give a damn you want me working the mouse on your site. Your site probably sucks ass and loaded with ads and popup offers and cookie banners and login hoops other bullshit I can’t stand that wasted my time. Oh check my email for a one time code becuase you don’t like passkeys.
This is expected. A lot of these companies that are closing their doors make a large portion of their revenue based off of ads and upsells which agents can easily be instructed to ignore, and don't interact with like a human.
Another more blunt way to say it is that people can instruct their agents to look out for their best interests (and while there are cracks they continue to get better at this), and companies hate that.
People will work around it similar to how we've worked around with adblockers for years, and it will just become a game of attrition as these companies work to preserve their moats until they find a way to preserve this revenue stream off of people's agents.
Yes, same with many other things where people were under informed or did t have the time to look out for their own interests. Such as filing complaints, citing the correct legal sections, knowing the procedures, knowing their rights, noticing when they are getting an unfair deal, etc etc.
I do see that there is another side to this. I saw complaints by an event organizer (think weddings etc) who got some special requests and went above and beyond to accommodate but it turns out the extensive requests likely were AI generated fully optimizing for the customer's interests, and just shamelessly asking for many favors essentially. She used to do these things because humans had a bit of embarrassment and friction around asking too many things and so it worked on a social agreement that if you ask it likely is truly important that you made the effort to ask. Now this cannot be assumed. So things will more to more formal rules, more explicit pricing for the small asks, and generally more adversarial and low trust systems that fully squeeze out the human slack from these systems.
An easy solution is to sell a "web search" subscription add-on that gets distributed to the sites your agents utilize. The script will flip overnight and ASO (agent search optimization) will be born. It could be a form of micropayment system that the internet has desperately needed for over a decade now.
I hope the irony isn't lost on these companies. Meta is one of the most aggressive companies against any sort of automation, perhaps after LinkedIn.
I'm trying to build a personal social media client to stop the platforms from shoving their feeds down my throat and to consume only the content I care about, so this hits home.
(I just got blocked from LinkedIn for letting an agent set all of the 77 email notification toggles off, which in hindsight was obvious but I wasn't going to do that manually since every toggle has their own separate page, it's a lot of clicks.)
Pro-tip: it costs very, very few tokens to have an agent (harness) sleep a random amount of hours between each toggle. Just tell it to. It's not burning tokens on `sleep`, just to call it.
It might not hit input cache at that rate but better than a block or ban. Keep the context window small.
Companies don't want it to be easy to cross shop their competition, the whole premise of Amazon is that it's so easy and simple you don't even check the competition. AI agents are leveling the playing field and helping customers find the best deals, so of course they're being banned
Recently bought something online from Home Depot and it arrived damaged. When I asked them for help they said I had to drive it back to the store myself.
If I have to drive to the store to get it, I wouldn’t have shopped with them! It feels like every time I don’t order with Amazon the stores remind me why I ought to.
Websites are closing their doors to their users too. I'm unable to register a GitHub account because the third-party bot protection service they use, called DataDome, thinks I am a bot just based on my IP and probably my extension combination, both in Firefox and Chromium. Datadome is also preventing me from accessing some regional sites of Leroy Merlin, Idealista, and a few other major websites in Portugal and Spain whose IT management suddenly decided Datadome is good for them.
A year ago, I contacted DataDome directly and they assured me that "fighting false-positives is their biggest priority" and their filters were fixed for a while until recently. A few days ago, I contacted them again, and now their stance is different: "our support channel is for customers only and this ticket will be closed." However, their customers have no idea that DataDome messes with their end-users, and reaching a tech support person who actually knows about their website using DataDome is unbelievably difficult.
Datadome reminds me of Cloudflare in their early days, when they were breaking UX for many users with Google reCAPTCHA.
I think people who rally against Amazon in this topic assume that the "savings" from much open price competition immediately come back to the consumer or the manufacturer. In my experience, with previous such tech improvement such as 'uber disrupting taxies', this has never been the case.
Both the consumer and the manufacturer/labor/driver/gig-worker always get the short end of the stick.... once AI-agents becomes indispensable part of life.
I would be surprised if you had enough data to be able to conclude such a lofty claim, especially accounting for increased availability of taxis in areas where there were none or few.
Either way, the benefits of price transparency are not imaginary, but they are also not the only factor. Things like insufficient buyers or sellers, government policy, etc are also in play.
All else being equal, a buyer being able to easily see seller A is more expensive than seller B for the same goods will result in lower prices for the buyer. But all else is rarely equal.
Without a convenience moat, commerce will get even more adversarial: membership pricing, surveillance pricing, loyalty perks, varied products to avoid price comparison (like mattresses and Costco).
Fortunately, if AI is really superhuman in capabilities it may still win the battle for the customer and keep prices competitive: aggressive price comparison, alternatives discovery, negotiation, group buying, etc.
How would the agent know it's a better product? All it has to go on are whatever bot-generated spam reviews and prompt injections that they can scrape.
In a fully agentic shopping experience, it's not obvious to me that providing a better product works to drive sales. Bargain-basement stores can make up a story about how their goods are lovingly handcrafted for decades of durability (adversarially tested against the most common agents, so they'll believe it) much more efficiently than I can honestly provide one.
It's the latest iteration of "a little X is good, a lot of X is bad".
Email was awesome when it first became widespread. I could cold-email random professors at other universities (I was in school at the time) and get meaningful responses back. Then lots of people (and companies) started cold-emailing, and it stopped working.
Social media is broken if there's nobody there, is great with a medium-sized community, and is broken if everyone is there.
Ad-supported websites can offer all kinds of valuable free services. Up until either (1) they become so ad-infested that they're no longer useful, or (2) all the users block ads.
There was a wave of websites providing APIs for programmatic access a while back. You could script together whatever flow you wanted. If no API was offered, you could scrape the HTML. That triggered a wave of alternate interfaces to sites, skipping their ads, skipping their engagement funnels, separating the value from the cost. So everything got locked up behind captchas and accounts and API keys with limited access.
This outcome was always inevitable. Humans don't understand social contracts, or they do and both sides abuse the hell out of it. We feel entitled to have just the loss leaders without ever buying anything else. When running businesses, we feel entitled to keep adding more and more adds and generally enshittifying the experience. People can take it or leave it, after all.
Agents don't change the underlying structure at all. They just magnify and accelerate parts of the system, and will therefore magnify and accelerate the reactive and defensive responses.
This is just because agents don’t see ads right? Regardless, this is one of the advantages of software heterogeneity. The cost to detect rises substantially and the false positive rate will eat you alive. My agent buys me things. On Amazon too, yeah. OpenTable is hard to handle but I’m sure it’s fixable.
Indeed. One could reasonably argue that viewing ads on Amazon plausibly lowers the cost of goods served, just as connected TV targeted advertising allows very low cost TVs. I think that’s quite believable. Given that, I’m a free rider, somewhat like a software or media pirate.
Not outlandish. The prices are a big motivator and I wonder how much they’d have to charge me to compensate. My agent probably sees the sponsored results before it sees the other results but that is probably considered insufficient compensation.
I think I’ll keep doing what I’m doing but primarily because if the world is forced to charge higher prices to compensate for the lack of advertising I think that isn’t an outcome I particularly am upset by. It passes a Categorical Imperative Test, if you will.
I will always block ads no matter what. I don't care about what is sustained, there will be some way to get these things, and if not, we will get used to that too. Meanwhile I will not tolerate ads.
I've never updated on this: The web was better when there were little or no ad-revenue based services. (and I'm ok with actually paying for services that add value)
Weird time to do it IMO, right on the brink of agents potentially becoming the main entity closing purchases for many. If agents succeed at becoming e-commerce middlemen for the masses, I think these decisions will age poorly and there will be some walking back.
my prediction: ai agents will have their day, but not on this version of the web. websites will have a separate xml/json/yaml version that agents can peruse without all the ads/js/etc
My agents can just take that feed and render it into a custom front end just for me too. Why would I browse the adversarial, bloated, ad infested version?
I agree. I’ve been saying for years that marketing teams need to switch to include marketing to LLMs.
I have (currently free but maybe paid in the future) accounts for side projects with businesses that Claude chose for me. (I reviewed the suggestion, but didn’t see a problem or reason to change it.) Why did Claude choose those providers? No idea, but if it’s through subtle marketing to Claude, then well done to them.
Why would that happen if the website owners are explicitly trying to prevent access? This isn't a technical issue, the agents are perfectly capable of working with the existing websites regardless of ads and javascript. The semantic web and machine readable representations was a 90s thing, agents don't need that really.
the js/yaml version would require a license key that connects to a business arrangement between the website and the owner of the crawler. the plain HTML version would adversarially block them (or even identify them, where they could be sued...once we have legal precedents for this stuff).
hm. for me, AI agents effectively already have their day unless there is a retrenchment. i essentially do not interact with the web (outside of a few social media sites) anymore
Without the ads? The pessimist in me thinks with all the ads, prompt injections, and long-form content marketing included. Already you can see Google's AI results rehashing marketing slop in the answers about how amazing one product or another is.
Wasn't there some restaurant review site that gets accused of doing pay-to-play hiding of negative reviews and promoting positive ones that calls up businesses and basically extorts them into their services? They have all the incentive in the world now to manipulate the results shown to AI agents. You won't even see the manipulation directly yourself when there's an AI sitting between you and the source acting like an obfuscation layer.
Entire networks. GPT dot became useless as it got systematically blocked by Cloudflare, Google cloud, vercel, etc. At the same time OpenAI blocked solutions like tailscale and others effectively killing the utility of browser control by dot.
First they forced their malware bot farms on us, now they want to rent them to us so they can turn the entire web into the dark web.
And eventually rug pull off the major retail sites and just redirect traffic to their own darker sites to scrape commissions, sell direct and keep the change.
I'm sure the teams thinking this up buy their lunches from a ghost kitchen run by illegals that's never had a health inspection,
located in the back of a laundromat with a phony business license and website that only accepts crypto.
Finally, we are at the dawn of the next wave of disruption.
Web 2.0 went from serving users to profit maximization. Amazon became unusable. Streaming services fractured and fragmented, with content locked behind numerous paywalls. Ads permeate every surface.
This is not to say the agentic era will end differently. But at the onset of this era, and for the foreseeable future, customer adoption and trust will decide winners and losers.
it looks like this is solving itself in the usual and productive way:
> Instead of trying to fight Amazon, the company has partnered with retailers like Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Best Buy, and others, allowing Muse to shop on their sites. At the same time, Shopify has also opened its network of storefronts to AI agents.
they're making deals with the sites so that the agents can work, the sites get compensated. I hope for this "AI can do what it wants if it pays" model to expand further. Cloudflare told us months ago we'd have an option to get paid by AI crawlers. I signed up to join but of course as a nobody I never got a reply.
I have yet to meet a website I can't crawl with Chrome MCP. You just need to go slow and do extra actions that look human. When there's a captcha, AI notifies me to solve it, I do, it continues. All this is for personal use.
The whole web is based on selling people's attention, providing free services as "payment" to people. The whole value proposition of AI is to give the services without giving people's attention?
When people were uploading music videos on YouTube, media companies fought to the death to prevent that. Then suddenly they 180 and started promoting YouTube videos and begging for views.
This will go the same way, in 2 years 99% of Internet traffic will be AI agents. You close the doors, you stop existing.
Recently I've asked an agent to find me a laptop with particular requirements. You do not let the agent search your site, you will not get the sale.
This annoys me. I can understand stopping mass scraping by big labs, but if I tell my personal instance to try and find the best price for a 40" monitor, it should be able to get details from any site. It's acting as my proxy.
Not only this, but the AI will start picking up the scam websites that allow it to search it.
Solvable problems (just login or pay). This is more than just blocking anonymous scrapers. Sites are blocking access to agents even when they have a proper "ticket" for access.
It's insane to me that people don't see that agents are going to be how you interact with your computer going forward, almost exclusively. The people who make things hard for agents are going to get eviscerated by the people who don't just make it easy for agents to do things, but market primarily to agents rather than humans.
We host a website in Canada (physical server hosting VMs in a Canadian DC) and with the ongoing trade-war we do whatever we can to avoid anything US-based tech such as Cloudflare. So far we use Anubis to protect our services from scraping and it's been a decent experience.
It really sucks for small businesses. Their websites get absolutely hammered and they can’t afford or don’t know how to stop it. Cloudflare ends up winning as they’re the easiest solution.
What prevents other hosting sites from providing similar tooling?
As a user (bot or flesh) you have to jump through these hoops, and to the website operators they get fewer complaints when users (and bots) are able to contort themselves in predictable ways. Versus you'd perceive as a website operator, if your blocking worked at all, that you'd risk seeing a precipitous dropoff of bots if you did things in bespoke ways, as both bots (true positives, among dd and cf survivors) and people (false positives) get jammed.
The net effect in this model would be that such things as cloudflare and datadome take money from websites in order to block "dumb" bots and enfranchise "smart" bots to the point of creating a market for bot services. People that want to bot have to use AI or go to bot service providers.
For website operators that's a worthwhile exchange for dollars, in that dumb bots can cause a lot of harm in wasted compute. Bots are typically dead end users who won't buy ever anyway, or merely inefficient way of doing business if they scrape excessively. And many do scrape excessively.
"reform school for bots" is a good mental model. For this to work, the "reforms" have to be consistent so that bots can conform to them.
It's a peculiar equilibrium and I am not sure that it's all that stable as an equilibrium. Would be a good subject for a formal treatment, game theory and economics.
Bunny.net is another one that I find similar to Cloudflare from pricing and functionality perspective
What really sucks is e.g. Gemini that pulls images without being able to go to the source (unless it changed recently.)
Want to argue for a shining new world, but you're on a locked site? I guess we'll have to live with dystopia. Want to sell the greatest widget since the invention of sliced bread? Well, I never found it. Sorry, I bought inferior widgets from your competitor instead. I'm at a physical sales location, but I can't access your spec-sheets? Your competitor the next shelf over doesn't have that problem, I'll go buy theirs.
Another more blunt way to say it is that people can instruct their agents to look out for their best interests (and while there are cracks they continue to get better at this), and companies hate that.
People will work around it similar to how we've worked around with adblockers for years, and it will just become a game of attrition as these companies work to preserve their moats until they find a way to preserve this revenue stream off of people's agents.
I do see that there is another side to this. I saw complaints by an event organizer (think weddings etc) who got some special requests and went above and beyond to accommodate but it turns out the extensive requests likely were AI generated fully optimizing for the customer's interests, and just shamelessly asking for many favors essentially. She used to do these things because humans had a bit of embarrassment and friction around asking too many things and so it worked on a social agreement that if you ask it likely is truly important that you made the effort to ask. Now this cannot be assumed. So things will more to more formal rules, more explicit pricing for the small asks, and generally more adversarial and low trust systems that fully squeeze out the human slack from these systems.
https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/l40...
I'm trying to build a personal social media client to stop the platforms from shoving their feeds down my throat and to consume only the content I care about, so this hits home.
(I just got blocked from LinkedIn for letting an agent set all of the 77 email notification toggles off, which in hindsight was obvious but I wasn't going to do that manually since every toggle has their own separate page, it's a lot of clicks.)
It might not hit input cache at that rate but better than a block or ban. Keep the context window small.
If I have to drive to the store to get it, I wouldn’t have shopped with them! It feels like every time I don’t order with Amazon the stores remind me why I ought to.
A year ago, I contacted DataDome directly and they assured me that "fighting false-positives is their biggest priority" and their filters were fixed for a while until recently. A few days ago, I contacted them again, and now their stance is different: "our support channel is for customers only and this ticket will be closed." However, their customers have no idea that DataDome messes with their end-users, and reaching a tech support person who actually knows about their website using DataDome is unbelievably difficult.
Datadome reminds me of Cloudflare in their early days, when they were breaking UX for many users with Google reCAPTCHA.
Both the consumer and the manufacturer/labor/driver/gig-worker always get the short end of the stick.... once AI-agents becomes indispensable part of life.
Either way, the benefits of price transparency are not imaginary, but they are also not the only factor. Things like insufficient buyers or sellers, government policy, etc are also in play.
All else being equal, a buyer being able to easily see seller A is more expensive than seller B for the same goods will result in lower prices for the buyer. But all else is rarely equal.
Fortunately, if AI is really superhuman in capabilities it may still win the battle for the customer and keep prices competitive: aggressive price comparison, alternatives discovery, negotiation, group buying, etc.
Email was awesome when it first became widespread. I could cold-email random professors at other universities (I was in school at the time) and get meaningful responses back. Then lots of people (and companies) started cold-emailing, and it stopped working.
Social media is broken if there's nobody there, is great with a medium-sized community, and is broken if everyone is there.
Ad-supported websites can offer all kinds of valuable free services. Up until either (1) they become so ad-infested that they're no longer useful, or (2) all the users block ads.
There was a wave of websites providing APIs for programmatic access a while back. You could script together whatever flow you wanted. If no API was offered, you could scrape the HTML. That triggered a wave of alternate interfaces to sites, skipping their ads, skipping their engagement funnels, separating the value from the cost. So everything got locked up behind captchas and accounts and API keys with limited access.
This outcome was always inevitable. Humans don't understand social contracts, or they do and both sides abuse the hell out of it. We feel entitled to have just the loss leaders without ever buying anything else. When running businesses, we feel entitled to keep adding more and more adds and generally enshittifying the experience. People can take it or leave it, after all.
Agents don't change the underlying structure at all. They just magnify and accelerate parts of the system, and will therefore magnify and accelerate the reactive and defensive responses.
I constantly get pestered by "are you a bot" queries.
They ruined the world wide web here. I did not have that in the 1990s or early 2000s.
Put another way, because it undermines the revenue that is providing you the service. Working around it is not a sustainable solution.
Not outlandish. The prices are a big motivator and I wonder how much they’d have to charge me to compensate. My agent probably sees the sponsored results before it sees the other results but that is probably considered insufficient compensation.
I think I’ll keep doing what I’m doing but primarily because if the world is forced to charge higher prices to compensate for the lack of advertising I think that isn’t an outcome I particularly am upset by. It passes a Categorical Imperative Test, if you will.
I have (currently free but maybe paid in the future) accounts for side projects with businesses that Claude chose for me. (I reviewed the suggestion, but didn’t see a problem or reason to change it.) Why did Claude choose those providers? No idea, but if it’s through subtle marketing to Claude, then well done to them.
Grim. No point in writing blog posts or publishing anything for free if that's the future.
Wasn't there some restaurant review site that gets accused of doing pay-to-play hiding of negative reviews and promoting positive ones that calls up businesses and basically extorts them into their services? They have all the incentive in the world now to manipulate the results shown to AI agents. You won't even see the manipulation directly yourself when there's an AI sitting between you and the source acting like an obfuscation layer.
First they forced their malware bot farms on us, now they want to rent them to us so they can turn the entire web into the dark web.
And eventually rug pull off the major retail sites and just redirect traffic to their own darker sites to scrape commissions, sell direct and keep the change.
I'm sure the teams thinking this up buy their lunches from a ghost kitchen run by illegals that's never had a health inspection,
located in the back of a laundromat with a phony business license and website that only accepts crypto.
Web 2.0 went from serving users to profit maximization. Amazon became unusable. Streaming services fractured and fragmented, with content locked behind numerous paywalls. Ads permeate every surface.
This is not to say the agentic era will end differently. But at the onset of this era, and for the foreseeable future, customer adoption and trust will decide winners and losers.
> Instead of trying to fight Amazon, the company has partnered with retailers like Walmart, Gap, Sephora, Best Buy, and others, allowing Muse to shop on their sites. At the same time, Shopify has also opened its network of storefronts to AI agents.
they're making deals with the sites so that the agents can work, the sites get compensated. I hope for this "AI can do what it wants if it pays" model to expand further. Cloudflare told us months ago we'd have an option to get paid by AI crawlers. I signed up to join but of course as a nobody I never got a reply.
Look at spotify and their royalties. Theres already such little value in human based internet that agents will race to the bottom.
The only internet content will be worse than adware. Itll just be agent poison meant to take your money.
Any other viewpoint seems to ignore the already shattered shared internet.
I mean there are multiple reasons not just the AI agents but that's also a part of it
This will go the same way, in 2 years 99% of Internet traffic will be AI agents. You close the doors, you stop existing.
Recently I've asked an agent to find me a laptop with particular requirements. You do not let the agent search your site, you will not get the sale.
Not only this, but the AI will start picking up the scam websites that allow it to search it.
(Shrug) Well, they must not want to sell anything to me.
This is not a battle that site owners want to fight. They may think it is, but they're horrifically wrong about that.
You are in a bubble. Normal people (i.e. 99% of people) will not use these agentic tools:
* Some, probably most, won't use them because they don't trust them
* Agentic tool providers can't possibly supply everyone with their own free agentic tooling
* The vast majority of people will not pay providers what it will cost to run these agentic tools (or even anything)
* The vast majority of people cannot afford to buy their own hardware to run their own agentic tools in-house
* Agentic tooling is mostly useless for most people (who cares that it can check you into flights, most people don't have that kind of problem)