Solved: Anyone submitted their store to ChatGPT?

#devops #programming #tutorial #cloud

🚀 Executive Summary

TL;DR: AI crawlers like ChatGPT-User can overwhelm server resources by aggressively crawling, leading to performance issues. This guide provides three strategies, from simple robots.txt directives to robust web server blocks and automated IP blocking, to protect infrastructure and maintain performance.

🎯 Key Takeaways

AI training bots (e.g., ChatGPT-User, Google-Extended) are voracious resource consumers, unlike standard search engine bots, and can cause significant server load.
The robots.txt file offers a polite, low-effort method to request bots to disallow crawling, but it relies on bot cooperation and is not a command.
Blocking bots at the web server level (e.g., Nginx User-Agent check returning 403) is a highly reliable and efficient method that prevents requests from reaching the application.
Automated IP blocking with tools like fail2ban is a high-risk, last-resort solution due to the potential for false positives and blocking legitimate users from shared cloud IP ranges.
For most cases, a combination of robots.txt and proactive User-Agent blocking on the web server provides an effective defense against unwanted AI crawler traffic.

Struggling with AI crawlers like ChatGPT overwhelming your servers? Learn three practical, real-world strategies—from the simple robots.txt fix to robust server-level blocks—to protect your infrastructure and performance.

My Servers vs. The AI Horde: A Practical Guide to Blocking ChatGPT and Other Bots

It was 3:17 AM. PagerDuty was screaming about CPU utilization on our primary database, prod-db-01. My first thought was a DDoS attack or maybe a botched deployment from the EU team. After 20 frantic minutes digging through logs on our web nodes, I found the culprit… not a malicious actor, but a single, absurdly aggressive User-Agent: ChatGPT-User. It was crawling every single product variant, ignoring every polite ‘slow down’ signal, and was seconds away from creating a resource contention that would have taken down our entire storefront. This wasn’t an attack; it was an overly enthusiastic, uninvited guest eating everything in the pantry.

So, Why Is This Happening?

Let’s get one thing straight: these bots aren’t typically malicious. User agents like ChatGPT-User (from OpenAI) and Google-Extended (for Bard/Gemini) are web crawlers designed to gather massive amounts of data to train Large Language Models (LLMs). The problem is, they are voracious. Unlike the standard Googlebot that indexes for search and is generally well-behaved, these AI training bots can be relentless.

They don’t buy products. They don’t sign up for newsletters. They just consume resources—CPU cycles, database connections, and bandwidth. For a small to medium-sized e-commerce site or application, a single one of these bots can feel like a denial-of-service attack, grinding your application to a halt. So, let’s put a stop to it.

The Fixes: From Polite Request to Fort Knox

I’ve handled this exact scenario more times than I can count. Here are the three levels of defense we use at TechResolve, starting with the simplest.

Solution 1: The “Please Don’t Touch” Sign (robots.txt)

This is your first, easiest, and most “polite” line of defense. The robots.txt file is a standard that asks well-behaved bots not to crawl certain parts of your site, or the whole thing. The good news is that major players like OpenAI and Google claim to respect it.

Simply add the following to the robots.txt file in your website’s root directory:

# Block OpenAI's GPT bot
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

# Block Google's AI bot
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

# You might as well block Common Crawl's bot too
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /

Pro Tip: This is a request, not a command. Think of it as a “No Soliciting” sign on your door. Most will respect it, but nothing technically forces them to. If your server is on fire, don’t wait for this to propagate; move on to Solution 2 immediately.

Solution 2: The Bouncer at the Door (Web Server Block)

When politeness fails, we escalate. The most reliable way to stop these bots is to block them at the edge—your web server (like Nginx or Apache) or your CDN/WAF (like Cloudflare). This rejects the request before it ever gets to your application, saving precious resources.

Here’s how you’d do it in Nginx. Add this snippet inside your main server block in your site’s configuration file:

# Block specific unwanted AI bots by their User-Agent string
if ($http_user_agent ~* (ChatGPT-User|Google-Extended|CCBot)) {
    return 403; # Forbidden
}

When the bot tries to connect, Nginx will check its User-Agent, see it on the blocklist, and immediately return a 403 Forbidden error without ever touching your application logic. This is my preferred, set-and-forget method. It’s clean, efficient, and requires no cooperation from the bot.

Solution 3: The ‘Nuclear’ Option (Automated IP Blocking)

Sometimes, you’re dealing with a poorly configured or rogue bot that ignores robots.txt and might even rotate its User-Agent. In this rare case, you have to block it at the firewall level based on its IP address. Doing this manually is a painful game of whack-a-mole, so we automate it with tools like fail2ban.

The strategy is to have fail2ban monitor your web server’s access logs (e.g., /var/log/nginx/access.log). You create a filter that looks for rapid, repeated requests from the same IP address that match a specific pattern (like crawling thousands of product pages in minutes). When the filter is triggered, fail2ban automatically adds a rule to your firewall (like iptables) to drop all traffic from that IP for a set period.

This is powerful, but also dangerous. It’s a last resort for a reason.

Warning: This is a hacky, high-risk solution. AI crawlers often operate from massive cloud provider IP ranges (like AWS or GCP). If you’re not extremely careful with your rules, you could accidentally block a whole subnet and lock out legitimate customers who happen to be using the same cloud infrastructure. Tread very, very carefully here.

Choosing Your Weapon: A Quick Comparison

Here’s a quick breakdown to help you decide which approach is right for you.

Method	Effort	Reliability	Risk
1. robots.txt	Lowest	Low (Bot-dependent)	None
2. Web Server Block	Low	High	Very Low
3. Automated IP Block	High	Highest	High (False Positives)

For 99% of cases, the combination of a robots.txt entry (Solution 1) and a proactive User-Agent block on your web server (Solution 2) is the perfect defense. It keeps your servers running smoothly and lets you sleep through the night without getting a PagerDuty alert from a bot that just wants to read your entire website.

Stay safe out there.

– Darian Vance, Senior DevOps Engineer, TechResolve