Cloudflare’s bot trap is weirdly satisfying
Matt V
March 24, 2025
CLOUDFLARE
Cloudflare has rolled out AI Labyrinth, a free tool designed to throw off bots that crawl websites without permission to collect data for AI training.
Rather than simplify blocking these bots, AI Labyrinth leads them through a maze of AI-generated decoy pages.
The content looks convincing but isn’t tied to the actual site.
It’s meant to show bots down, waste their resources, and make it easier for Cloudflare to track and understand new scraping tactics.
It’s so petty we love it.
Human visitors won’t see these fake pages, they’re hidden in the background.
The system builds on the idea of “honeypot,” but it takes it further.
While many websites rely on the robots.txt file to set scraping rules, some AI firms, like Anthropic and Perplexity AI, have reportedly ignored it.
Cloudflare says it handles over 50 billion crawler requests every day, and these bots are constantly changing tactics.
In brief:
AI Labyrinth confuses AI bots using fake, realistic-looking pages.
It helps detect new bot patterns while staying invisible to real users.
It’s free, opt-in, and available now through Cloudflare settings.
Keep crawling, babes
Admins who want to use AI Labyrinth can turn it on in the Bot Management section of their Cloudflare dashboard.
Cloudflare says this is just the beginning. Future versions will include even more advanced decoy networks to keep bots busy for longer.
Not all heroes wear capes. Some build decoy pages.