Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will “eat just about anything that finds its way inside.”
Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It’s not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an “infinite maze” of static files with no exit links, where they “get stuck” and “thrash around” for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That’s likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.
Same problems with tarpitting. They search engines are doing the crawling for each of their own companies, you don’t want to poison your own search results.
Conceptually, they’ll stop being search crawls altogether and if you expect to get any traffic it’ll come from AI crawls :/
I think to use it defensively, you should put the path into robots.txt, and only those doesn’t follows the rule will be greeted with the maze. For proper search engine crawler, that’s should be the standard behavior.
Spiders already detect link bombs, recursion bombs, they’re capable of rendering the page out in memory to see what’s truly visible.
It’s a great idea but it’s a really old trick and it’s already been covered.