WhatAn nginx-compatible middleware that uses TCP fingerprinting, JA3/JA4 hashing, and behavioral analysis to let site operators whitelist legitimate crawlers (like Internet Archive) while blocking aggressive AI scrapers — no Rust or deep networking expertise required.
SignalSite operators are spending significant time battling AI crawlers that ignore robots.txt, rotate IPs, and evade detection — they want to allow legitimate archiving but lack the tooling to distinguish good bots from bad ones without deep networking knowledge.
Why NowAI crawler traffic has exploded in the past year, even major platforms like Facebook now ignore robots.txt and crawl-delay directives, and existing bot management solutions (Cloudflare, Akamai) are too expensive or coarse-grained for small-to-mid publishers.
MarketMillions of self-hosted website operators and small publishers; Cloudflare Bot Management starts at enterprise pricing; open-source tools like fail2ban are not purpose-built for this problem.
MoatFingerprint database that improves with scale — every deployment contributes anonymized bot signatures, creating a shared intelligence network that gets better the more sites use it.
Blocking Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but Will Erase Web's Historical RecordView discussion ↗ · Article ↗ · 536 pts · March 21, 2026
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