Block AI Crawlers with One Click: Vercel's New AI Bot Managed Ruleset.

Block AI Crawlers with One Click: Vercel's New AI Bot Managed Ruleset.

As a developer, I've been watching with growing concern as AI crawlers steadily consume more and more bandwidth across the web. These bots from Open AI, Anthropic and Perplexity are now generating more traffic than actual users on many popular sites which causing infrastructure costs and raising serious questions about data usage.

What's particularly frustrating ๐Ÿ˜ค is how many of these crawlers simply ignore robots.txt directives. The traditional ways of controlling crawler behavior just aren't cutting it anymore.

That's why I was excited to see Vercel's new AI bot managed ruleset that launched yesterday. With a single toggle, it blocks unauthorized AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot. ๐Ÿšซ๐Ÿค–

๐Ÿš€ How to Enable It

๐Ÿ”น Go to your project dashboard and select the Firewall tab
๐Ÿ”น Click Configure
๐Ÿ”น In the Bot Protection section, choose Log or Challenge mode
๐Ÿ”น Review your changes and hit Publish โœ…

โ„น๏ธ You'll need Developer or Viewer permissions to view the Firewall page, and Project administrator or Team member status to save and apply configurations.

Publish By Piyush Kashyap