I'd link to some blog posts about this an example, but the site they're from went down a while ago.
At risk of giving anyone ideas, why do LLM training scrapers request pages from sites millions of times per day instead of just doing the equivalent of wget -r https://example.com/ ? If the point is just stealing things people have written, what do they accomplish by wasting a web host's resources beyond being an ⊛ to webmasters?
Edit:
Let me elaborate. A lot of the answers i'm seeing are just restating the problem without explaining why LLM scrapers are apparently all either coded by idiots or assholes. I know that they're hitting sites with unreasonable numbers of requests, wasting bandwidth, and making tools like Anubis too important. I know that's what's happening. I'm asking why. What they gain from not being even a little intelligent about this.
With all the money and effort (and maybe even brainpower) going into this, surely there's some explanation beyond incompetence.
I'm just correcting you architectural definition. No crawler needs to vertically scale as you define it here and in fact it would be a worse tech for "slurp all data" goal.
The real answer is much more simple - incompetence. The inability to write a good cralwer by leaders in software tech is much damning than anything else. It's like leading car manufacturers not being able to make the wheels round - it's just sad.
However this actually shows a much more important problem with the web - we have no way to defer or distribute negative externalities and people have been trying to solve this since the inception of the internet itself. It'll never be solved but minimized to the point where the impact is just something you tolerate because it's simply impossible to solve and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
Source: I've been working on similar problems for the last 20 years at least.
You’re not correcting anything, dude.
Whatever, stew in your ignorance then. Bye.
Been stewing at it for longer than you have, buddy.