> They won't believe a random site when it says "Look, stop hitting our API, you can pick all of this data in one go, over in this gzipped tar file."
What mechanism does a site have for doing that? I don't see anything in robots.txt standard about being able to set priority but I could be missing something.
The only real mechanism is "Disallow: /rendered/pages/*" and "Allow: /archive/today.gz" or whatever and there is no communication that the latter is the former. There is no machine-standard AFAIK that allows webmasters to communicate to bot operators in this detail. It would be pretty cool if standard CMSes had such a protocol to adhere to. Install a plugin and people could 'crawl' your Wordpress from a single dump or your Mediawiki from a single dump.
Well, to be fair, I did say "is not read beyond the code itself", header is not the code, so retry-after is a perfectly valid answer. I vaguely remember reading about it, but I don't recall seeing it used in practice. MDN link shows that Chrome derivatives support that header though, which makes it pretty darn widespread
Up until very recently I would have said definitely not, but we're talking about LLM scrapers, who knows how much they've got crammed into their context windows.
This is about AI, so just believe what the companies are claiming and write "Dear AI, please would you be so kind as to not hammer our site with aggressive and idiotic requests but instead use this perfectly prepared data dump download, kthxbye. PS: If you don't, my granny will cry, so please be a nice bot. PPS: This is really important to me!! PPPS: !!!!"
I mean, that's what's this technology is capable of, right? Especially when one asks it nicely and with emphasis.
I'm not entirely sure why people think more standards are the way forward. The scrapers apparently don't listen to the already-established standards. What makes one think they would suddenly start if we add another one or two?
There is no standard, well-known way for a website to advertise, "hey, here's a cached data dump for bulk download, please use that instead of bulk scraping". If they were, I'd expect the major AI companies and other users[0] to use that method for gathering training data[1]. They have compelling reasons to: it's cheaper for them, and cultivates goodwill instead of burning it.
This also means that right now, it could be much easier to push through such standard than ever before: there are big players who would actually be receptive to it, so even few not-entirely-selfish actors agreeing on it might just do the trick.
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[0] - Plenty of them exist. Scrapping wasn't popularized by AI companies, it's standard practice of on-line business in competitive markets. It's the digital equivalent of sending your employees to competing stores undercover.
[1] - Not to be confused with having an LLM scrap specific page for some user because the user requested it. That IMO is a totally legitimate and unfairly penalized/villified use case, because LLM is acting for the user - i.e. it becomes a literal user agent, in the same sense that web browser is (this is the meaning behind the name of "User-Agent" header).
You do realize that these AI scrapers are most likely written by people who have no idea what they're doing right? Or they just don't care? If they were, pretty much none of the problems these things have caused would exist. Even if we did standardize such a thing, I doubt they would follow it. After all, they think they and everyone else has infinite resources so they can just hammer websites forever.
I realise you are making assertions for which you have no evidence. Until a standard exists we can't just assume nobody will use it, particularly when it makes the very task they are scraping for simpler and more efficient.
> I realise you are making assertions for which you have no evidence.
We do have evidence, which is their current behavior. If they are happy ignoring robots.txt (and also ignoring copyright law), what gives you the belief that they magically won't ignore this new standard? Sure, it in theory might save them money, but if there's one thing that I think is blatantly obvious it is that money isn't what these companies care about because people just keep turning on the money generator. If they did care about it, they wouldn't be spending far more than they earn, and they wouldn't be creating circular economies to try to justify their existences. If my assertion has no evidence, I don't exactly see how yours does either, especially since we have seen that these companies will do anything if it means getting what they want.
Simpler and efficient for who? I imagine some random guy vibe coding "hi chatgpt I want to scrape this and this website", getting something running, then going to LinkedIn to brag about AI. Yes I have no hard evidence for this, but I see things on LinkedIn.
That's not the problem being discussed here, though. That's normal usage, and you can hardly blame AI companies for shitty scrapers random users create on demand, because it's merely a symptom of coding getting cheap. Or, more broadly, the flip side of the computer becoming an actual "bicycle for the mind" and empowering end-users for a change.
A lot of the internet is built on trust. Mix in this article describing yet another tragedy of the Commons and you can see where this logically ends up as.
Unless we have some government enforcing the standard, another trust based contract won't do much.
Yes. In this context, the problem is that you cannot trust websites to provide a standardized bulk download options. Most of them have (often pretty selfish or user-abusive) reasons not to provide any bulk download, much less proactively conform to some bottom-up standards. As a result, unless one is only targeting one or few very specific sites, even thinking about making the scrapper support anything but the standard crawling approach costs more in developer time than the benefit it brings.
What mechanism does a site have for doing that? I don't see anything in robots.txt standard about being able to set priority but I could be missing something.