description: "Using Hugo to politely ask AI bots to not steal my content - and then configuring Cloudflare's WAF to actively block them, just to be sure."
featured: false
toc: true
comments: true
categories: Backstage
tags:
- cloud
- cloudflare
- hugo
- meta
- selfhosting
---
I've seen some recent posts from folks like [Cory Dransfeldt](https://coryd.dev/posts/2024/go-ahead-and-block-ai-web-crawlers/) and [Ethan Marcotte](https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/blockin-bots/) about how (and *why*) to prevent your personal website from being slurped up by the crawlers that AI companies use to [actively enshittify the internet](https://boehs.org/node/llms-destroying-internet). I figured it was past time for me to hop on board with this, so here we are.
My initial approach was to use [Hugo's robots.txt templating](https://gohugo.io/templates/robots/) to generate a `robots.txt` file based on a list of bad bots I got from [ai.robots.txt on GitHub](https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt).
I dumped that list into my `config/params.toml` file, *above* any of the nested elements (since toml is kind of picky about that...).
```toml
robots = [
"AdsBot-Google",
"Amazonbot",
"anthropic-ai",
"Applebot",
"AwarioRssBot",
"AwarioSmartBot",
"Bytespider",
"CCBot",
"ChatGPT",
"ChatGPT-User",
"Claude-Web",
"ClaudeBot",
"cohere-ai",
"DataForSeoBot",
"Diffbot",
"FacebookBot",
"Google-Extended",
"GPTBot",
"ImagesiftBot",
"magpie-crawler",
"omgili",
"Omgilibot",
"peer39_crawler",
"PerplexityBot",
"YouBot"
]
[author]
name = "John Bowdre"
```
I then created a new template in `layouts/robots.txt`:
```text
Sitemap: {{ .Site.BaseURL }}/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow:
{{ range .Site.Params.robots }}
User-agent: {{ . }}
{{- end }}
Disallow: /
```
And enabled the template processing for this in my `config/hugo.toml` file:
```toml
enableRobotsTXT = true
```
Now Hugo will generate the following `robots.txt` file for me:
I'm hosting this site [on Neocities](/deploy-hugo-neocities-github-actions/), and Neocities unfortunately (though perhaps wisely) doesn't give me control of the web server there. But the site is fronted by Cloudflare, and that does give me a lot of options for blocking stuff I don't want.
So I added a [WAF Custom Rule](https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/custom-rules/) to block those unwanted bots. (I could have used their [User Agent Blocking](https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/user-agent-blocking) to accomplish the same, but you can only set 10 of those on the free tier. I can put all the user agents together in a single WAF Custom Rule.)
(http.user_agent contains "AdsBot-Google") or (http.user_agent contains "Amazonbot") or (http.user_agent contains "anthropic-ai") or (http.user_agent contains "Applebot") or (http.user_agent contains "AwarioRssBot") or (http.user_agent contains "AwarioSmartBot") or (http.user_agent contains "Bytespider") or (http.user_agent contains "CCBot") or (http.user_agent contains "ChatGPT-User") or (http.user_agent contains "ClaudeBot") or (http.user_agent contains "Claude-Web") or (http.user_agent contains "cohere-ai") or (http.user_agent contains "DataForSeoBot") or (http.user_agent contains "FacebookBot") or (http.user_agent contains "Google-Extended") or (http.user_agent contains "GoogleOther") or (http.user_agent contains "GPTBot") or (http.user_agent contains "ImagesiftBot") or (http.user_agent contains "magpie-crawler") or (http.user_agent contains "Meltwater") or (http.user_agent contains "omgili") or (http.user_agent contains "omgilibot") or (http.user_agent contains "peer39_crawler") or (http.user_agent contains "peer39_crawler/1.0") or (http.user_agent contains "PerplexityBot") or (http.user_agent contains "Seekr") or (http.user_agent contains "YouBot")
```
