this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
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The robots.txt construct is completely voluntary and some bots use it to specially target content.
In my opinion, anyone relying on this to protect their content has no business publishing anything online.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
Of course it's voluntary, but if entities like OpenAI say they will respect it then presumably they really will.
Couple of things:
I agree with your points 2-4 but I have observed on my own website that the crawlers who don't respect won't, and the crawlers who do respect will.
How did you find this information? I know how to check traffic for my website, but idk how to get from "list of IPs" to "these ones are crawlers"
apologies if this is a silly question
I used to sit and monitor my server access logs. You can tell by the access patterns. Many of the well-behaved bots announce themselves in their user agents, so you can see when they're on. I could see them crawl the main body of my website, but not go to a subdomain, which is clearly linked from the homepage but is disallowed from my robots.txt.
On the other hand, spammy bots that are trying to attack you will often instead have access patterns that try to probe your website for common configurations for common CMSes like WordPress. They don't tend to crawl.
Google also provides a tool to test robots.txt, for example.
Perhaps this will help your understanding of my first point.
https://gizmodo.com/former-openai-board-member-sam-altman-chatgpt-1851506252