Cloudflare’s new ‘AI Labyrinth’ tool to help users combat web-scraping bots

The leading internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has launched “AI Labyrinth,” an innovative tool designed to combat web-scraping bots that extract data from websites without permission.

This free opt-in tool utilises artificial intelligence (AI) to lure malicious crawlers into a maze of decoy pages, slowing them down and wasting their resources.

Although websites have traditionally relied on the robots.txt file to regulate web scraping, this approach has proven ineffective, as many AI companies ignore these directives.

However, Cloudflare reported that it handles over 50 billion web crawler requests daily, and while it has existing tools to detect and block malicious bots, these measures often prompt attackers to adapt and change their tactics.

Instead of blocking bots, AI Labyrinth employs a more sophisticated approach. By presenting crawlers with AI-generated decoy pages, Cloudflare aims to confuse these malicious actors, making it easier to identify and fingerprint them.

This approach also enables Cloudflare to detect new bot patterns and signatures that might have gone undetected otherwise.

Additionally, website administrators can enable AI Labyrinth by accessing the Bot Management section of their Cloudflare dashboard.

The tech giant has also noted that this is just the first iteration of this technology and plans to develop more advanced features such as networks of linked URLs designed to trap and mislead malicious bots.