Some thoughts on how useful Anubis really is. Combined with comments I read elsewhere about scrapers starting to solve the challenges, I’m afraid Anubis will be outdated soon and we need something else.

  • rtxn@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    New developments: just a few hours before I post this comment, The Register posted an article about AI crawler traffic. https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/ai_crawler_traffic/

    Anubis’ developer was interviewed and they posted the responses on their website: https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/el-reg-responses/

    In particular:

    Fastly’s claims that 80% of bot traffic is now AI crawlers

    In some cases for open source projects, we’ve seen upwards of 95% of traffic being AI crawlers. For one, deploying Anubis almost instantly caused server load to crater by so much that it made them think they accidentally took their site offline. One of my customers had their power bills drop by a significant fraction after deploying Anubis. It’s nuts.

    So, yeah. If we believe Xe, OOP’s article is complete hogwash.

    • tofuOP
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      14 hours ago

      Cool article, thanks for linking! Not sure about that being a new development though, it’s just results, but we already knew it’s working. The question is, what’s going to work once the scrapers adapt?