Cloudflare launches AI maze to combat malicious crawlers and guides false data traps

Cloudflare recently launched a new tool called "AI Labyrinth" to combat unauthorized crawlers crawling website data. When improper crawler behavior is detected, the tool directs the crawler to a series of fake pages generated by AI, wasting its resources through procrastination and confusion.

Although webmasters often rely on “robots.txt” file management crawler access, many AI companies such as Anthropic and Perplexity AI often ignore these rules. Cloudflare faces more than 50 billion crawler requests every day. Although it can identify and block malicious requests, attackers constantly adjust their strategies to form an endless "arms race".

AI Labyrinth is designed to force crawlers to process information that is not related to the target website, trapping it in fake data. This is not only a "next generation bait" but it also helps identify malicious crawlers and understand their new features. These links are not visible to ordinary users and avoid interference.

Webmasters can enable this feature through the Crawler Management section in the Cloudflare dashboard. AI Labyrinth is Cloudflare's first step in using generative AI to fight crawlers. In the future, it will build more complex fake data networks to further increase the difficulty of crawler identification.

Official blog: https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/