Technology

Unfortunately it is out of date.

• IPs used by bots are now *highly * distributed. We will see the same bot use hundreds of thousands of IP addresses. Each IP can easily only make one or two requests which is hard to limit with volume based detections. Also, I'm not sure where you're at in the world, but it's more common in countries outside of North America to have IP addresses that are heavily shared. Not to mention, there are companies in Europe that will pay you for use of your IP address explicitly for bots.

• You might think you could limit by IP classification but bots increasingly use residential classified IPs.

• As for allowing good bots, that isn't so much an issue. They respect the robots.txt that companies implement. We see bots scraping data for LLMs more and more that don't respect this file. Also, bots that are scraping prices and anything else you don't want them doing, like credential stuffing, aren't going to listen or respect that either.

• In terms of using a VPN, absolutely limit outside access to sensitive infrastructure but that's not really where most companies experience pain from bots. That's not to say that we don't see bots attempting vulnerability scanning. These requests can be highly distributed too.

Companies ultimately reach out to companies like Cloudflare because the usual methods aren't working for them. Onboarding some clients, I've seen more bot requests than human requests which can be detrimental for business.

I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have. While I do work in the industry, I don't know everything. I just want to reiterate that I am not a fan of how things are currently on the Internet. I wish this was illegal as I think it would cut down on a lot of bot traffic which would make it much more manageable for everyone.