Skip to main content PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES Search PC Gamer View Profile Movies & TV Gaming Industry PC Gaming Show Newsletter Signup Community Guidelines Affiliate Links Meet the team About PC Gamer PC Gamer Magazine Subscription Why subscribe? Subscribe to the world's #1 PC gaming mag Try a single issue or save on a subscription Issues delivered straight to your door or device From£35.99View Spring Prime Day Monster Hunter Wilds Marvel Rivals 'No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense': Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth uses decoy pages to trap web-crawling bots and feed them slop 'as a defensive weapon' Andy Edser 24 March 2025 Follow me, horrible scrape bot. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Croteam) The web is plagued by bots. That's nothing new of course, but now we're in the midst of our much-loved AI revolution (you do love it, right?) many websites are continually crawled by bots aiming to scrape them of their precious data to train AI content. Cloudflare thinks it might have the solution, however, as its newly-announced AI Labyrinth tool aims to take the fight to the nefarious bots by "using generative AI as a defensive weapon." Cloudflare says that AI crawlers generate more than 50 billion requests to its network every day—and while tools exist to block them, these methods can alert attackers that they've been noticed, causing them to shift approach (via The Verge). AI Labyrinth, however, links detected bots to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to draw them in, but contain no useful information. You may like Coder creates an 'infinite maze' to snare AI bots in an act of 'sheer unadulterated rage at how things are going' on the content-scraped web One YouTuber has been poisoning AI tools that access her videos with .ass subtitle files and you can too Why? Well, because they were generated by AI, of course. Essentially this creates an ouroboros of AI slop in, AI slop out, to the point where the bot wastes precious time and resources churning through useless content instead of scraping something created by an actual human being. "As an added benefit, AI Labyrinth also acts as a next-generation honeypot. No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense," says Cloudflare. (Image credit: via Getty Images/Yuichiro Chino) "Any visitor that does is very likely to be a bot, so this gives us a brand-new tool to identify and fingerprint bad bots, which we add to our list of known bad actors." It's bots, bots all the way down. The AI-generated "poisoned" content is integrated in the form of hidden links on existing pages, meaning a human is unlikely to find them but a web crawler will. The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsReceive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsBy submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. To double down on the human-first angle, Cloudflare also says these links will only be added to pages viewed by suspected AI scrapers, so the rest of us shouldn't even notice it's working away in the background, fighting evil bots like some sort of Batman-esque caped crusader. Enabling the tool is a simple matter of ticking a checkbox in Cloudflare's settings page, and ta-da, off to work the AI Labyrinth goes. Cloudflare says this is merely the first iteration of this particular tech and encourages its users to opt in to the system so it can be refined in future. Your next machine (Image credit: Future) Best gaming PC: The top pre-built machines. Best gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming. I do have a question, though. Given AI is now, let's face it, bloody everywhere, are we really sure that making its training process worse isn't going to have longer-term effects? Far be it from me to take the side of the nefarious crawlers, but I wonder if this will simply lead to a glut of even-more-terrible AI models in future if their training data is hamstrung from the start. Ah, screw it, I've talked myself out of my own counter argument. Something needs to be done about relentless permission-free data scraping from genuine human endeavour, and I salute the clever thinking behind this particular defensive tool. If I could make one suggestion, however, could we perhaps add a Minotaur? All good labyrinths need one, and then I can write something like "Cloudflare has grabbed the bull by the horns and..." Fill in your own headline there. Or, y'know, get an AI to do it for you. Kidding, kidding. I probably shouldn't be feeding the AI any more of my terrible jokes anyway. Social Links Navigation Hardware Writer Andy built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 12, when IDE cables were a thing and high resolution wasn't—and he hasn't stopped since. Now working as a hardware writer for PC Gamer, Andy's been jumping around the world attending product launches and trade shows, all the while reviewing every bit of PC hardware he can get his hands on. You name it, if it's interesting hardware he'll write words about it, with opinions and everything. You must confirm your public display name before commenting Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name. Coder creates an 'infinite maze' to snare AI bots in an act of 'sheer unadulterated rage at how things are going' on the content-scraped web One YouTuber has been poisoning AI tools that access her videos with .ass subtitle files and you can too Razer is collaborating on a gaming CAPTCHA to combat AI-powered bots, and of course the first game to use it is the worst Web3 nonsense I've ever seen We need a better name for AI, or we risk talking past each other until actually intelligent AGI comes home mooing Meta wants AI characters to fill up Facebook and Instagram 'kind of in the same way accounts do,' but also had to delete a humiliating first run of its official bots OpenAI is working on a new AI model Sam Altman says is ‘good at creative writing’ but to me it reads like a 15-year-old's journal Latest in AI 'No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense': Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth uses decoy pages to trap web-crawling bots and feed them slop 'as a 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