User-agent: *
Disallow: /noindex/
Disallow: /misc/

# I opt out of online advertising so malware that injects ads on my site won't
# get paid. You should do the same. my ads.txt file contains a standard
# placeholder to forbid any compliant ad networks from paying for ad placement
# on my domain.
User-Agent: Adsbot
Disallow: /
Allow: /ads.txt
Allow: /app-ads.txt

# By allowing us access, you enable the maximum number
# of advertisers to confidently purchase advertising space on your pages. Our
# comprehensive data insights help advertisers understand the suitability and
# context of your content, ensuring that their ads align with your audience's
# interests and needs. This alignment leads to improved user experiences,
# increased engagement, and ultimately, higher revenue potential for your
# publication. (https://www.peer39.com/crawler-notice)
#  --> fuck off.
User-agent: peer39_crawler
User-Agent: peer39_crawler/1.0
Disallow: /

## IP-violation scanners ##

# The next three are borrowed from https://www.videolan.org/robots.txt

# > This robot collects content from the Internet for the sole purpose of #
# helping educational institutions prevent plagiarism. [...] we compare student
# papers against the content we find on the Internet to see if we # can find
# similarities. (http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html)
#  --> fuck off.
User-Agent: TurnitinBot
Disallow: /

# > NameProtect engages in crawling activity in search of a wide range of brand
# and other intellectual property violations that may be of interest to our
# clients. (http://www.nameprotect.com/botinfo.html)
#  --> fuck off.
User-Agent: NPBot
Disallow: /

# iThenticate is a new service we have developed to combat the piracy of
# intellectual property and ensure the originality of written work for#
# publishers, non-profit agencies, corporations, and newspapers.
# (http://www.slysearch.com/)
#  --> fuck off.
User-Agent: SlySearch
Disallow: /

# BLEXBot assists internet marketers to get information on the link structure
# of sites and their interlinking on the web, to avoid any technical and
# possible legal issues and improve overall online experience.
# (http://webmeup-crawler.com/)
# --> fuck off.
User-Agent: BLEXBot
Disallow: /

# Providing Intellectual Property professionals with superior brand protection
# services by artfully merging the latest technology with expert analysis.
# (https://www.checkmarknetwork.com/spider.html/)
# "The Internet is just way to big to effectively police alone." (ACTUAL quote)
# --> fuck off.
User-agent: CheckMarkNetwork/1.0 (+https://www.checkmarknetwork.com/spider.html)
Disallow: /

# Stop trademark violations and affiliate non-compliance in paid search.
# Automatically monitor your partner and affiliates’ online marketing to
# protect yourself from harmful brand violations and regulatory risks. We
# regularly crawl websites on behalf of our clients to ensure content
# compliance with brand and regulatory guidelines.
# (https://www.brandverity.com/why-is-brandverity-visiting-me)
# --> fuck off.
User-agent: BrandVerity/1.0
Disallow: /

## Misc. icky stuff ##

# Pipl assembles online identity information from multiple independent sources
# to create the most complete picture of a digital identity and connect it to
# real people and their offline identity records. When all the fragments of
# online identity data are collected, connected, and corroborated, the result
# is a more trustworthy identity.
# --> fuck off.
User-agent: PiplBot
Disallow: /

## Gen-AI data scrapers ##

# Eat shit, OpenAI.
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

# Official way to opt-out of Google's generative AI training:
# <https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/overview-google-crawlers>
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

# Official way to opt-out of LLM training by Apple
# <https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829#datausage>
User-agent: Applebot-Extended
Disallow: /

# Anthropic-AI crawler posted guidance after a long period of crawling without opt-out documentation: <https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler>
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /

# FacebookBot crawls public web pages to improve language models for our speech
# recognition technology.
# <https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/bot/?_fb_noscript=1>
User-Agent:  FacebookBot
Disallow: /

# I'm not blocking CCBot for now. It publishes a free index for anyone to use.
# Googe used this to train the initial version of Bard (now called Gemini).
# I allow CCBot since its index is also used for upstart/hobbyist search engines
# like Alexandria and for genuinely useful academic work I personally like.
# I allow Owler for similar reasons:
# <https://openwebsearch.eu/owler/#owler-opt-out>
# <https://openwebsearch.eu/common-goals-with-common-crawl/>.
# Omgilibot/Omgili is similar to CCBot, except it sells the scrape results.
# I'm not familiar enough with Omgili to make a call here.
# In the long run, my embedded robots meta-tags and headers could cover gen-AI

# I don't block cohere-ai or Perplexitybot: they don't appear to actually
# scrape data for LLM training purposes. The crawling powers search engines
# with integrated pre-trained LLMs.
# TODO: investigate whether YouBot scrapes to train its own in-house LLM.

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