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.