ROBOTS EXCLUSION PROTOCOL (RFC 9309) & AI SCRAPER MITIGATION
Technical specifications for crawler directive evaluation, wildcard regex syntax, artificial intelligence scraping defenses, and client privacy.
1. Evaluation Order & Precedence
Under the formalized IETF standard (RFC 9309), crawlers parse user-agent blocks by first identifying the most specific matching User-agent identifier. If no specific agent block matches the crawler's identity, the generic wildcard block (User-agent: *) is evaluated. Within a block:
- The longest matching path rule takes precedence over shorter rules.
- If an
Allowand aDisallowrule match the exact same character length,Allowtakes precedence. - Wildcards (
*) match zero or more characters; the dollar symbol ($) denotes strict end-of-URL termination.
2. AI Scraper & LLM Training Bot Defenses
Modern LLM data harvesting pipelines operate dedicated user agents distinct from search engine indexing crawlers:
User-agent, Disallow, Sitemap) are verified for exact case compliance.
/robots.txt).