Lies, as in that it's not really “blocking” but a mere unenforceable request? If you meant something else could you please point it out?
That is what they meant, yes. The title promises a block, completely preventing crawlers from accessing the site. That is not what is delivered.
Cloudflare just announced an AI Bot prevention system: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-block-ai-bots-scrapers-and-crawlers-with-a-single-click/
robots.txt does not work. I don't think it ever has - it's an honour system with no penalty for ignoring it.
I have a few low traffic sites hosted at home, and when a crawler takes an interest they can totally flood my connection. I'm using cloudflare and being incredibly aggressive with my filtering but so many bots are ignoring robots.txt as well as lying about who they are with humanesque UAs that it's having a real impact on my ability to provide the sites for humans.
Over the past year it's got around ten times worse. I woke up this morning to find my connection at a crawl and on checking the logs, AmazonBot has been hitting one site 12000 times an hour, and that's one of the more well-behaved bots. But there's thousands and thousands of them.
This does not block anything at all.
It's a 1994 "standard" that requires voluntary compliance and the user-agent is a string set by the operator of the tool used to access your site.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-Agent_header
In other words, the bot operator can ignore your robots.txt file and if you check your webserver logs, they can set their user-agent to whatever they like, so you cannot tell if they are ignoring you.
#TL;DR:
User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: / User-agent: Google-Extended Disallow: / User-agent: PerplexityBot Disallow: / User-agent: Amazonbot Disallow: / User-agent: ClaudeBot Disallow: / User-agent: Omgilibot Disallow: / User-Agent: FacebookBot Disallow: / User-Agent: Applebot Disallow: / User-agent: anthropic-ai Disallow: / User-agent: Bytespider Disallow: / User-agent: Claude-Web Disallow: / User-agent: Diffbot Disallow: / User-agent: ImagesiftBot Disallow: / User-agent: Omgilibot Disallow: / User-agent: Omgili Disallow: / User-agent: YouBot Disallow: /Of course, nothing stops a bot from picking a user agent field that exactly matches a web browser.
