AI Data Poisoning

Cloudflare introduced a feature that detects unauthorized AI web crawlers and routes them into a maze of realistic but irrelevant, AI-generated pages to waste their resources rather than blocking them outright. The company positions this as a strategic shift to avoid tipping off crawlers while mitigating large-scale scraping, noting that AI crawling constitutes a significant portion of web traffic and may drive an ongoing arms race between scrapers and defenses.