236
This free font can trick AI scrapers into swallowing gibberish instead of your content
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
236 points (95.7% liked)
Technology
86757 readers
3522 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
AI scrappers will just pretend to be screen readers then.
And if the approach becomes popular they will just OCR the text instead.
There's a fair chance they're already doing that. It provides better insight on the content, less formatting to handle, and even visual stuff gets text alternatives.
Per the GitHub:
In summary, they have two ways to get around this.
Sounds like an overly convoluted way to do exactly what Anubis does...
Yeah, if you care about screen reader users, functionally it's just "Anubis but worse". Unfortunately, most people don't care, so for them and all visual users, it has the benefit of no additional "load time" computational check — the page appears instantly without the Anubis step. Though I'm not sure how long it takes the page to do the de-scrambling.
The primary purpose of this project is to mutilate your HTML so bots can't scrape it, rather than preventing bot traffic in the first place. The screen reader stuff is a bolt-on.
There are laws about accessibility, at least for public websites, and probably for larger websites as they have such a large audience that disability can't be ignored (as much).
In my experience, those laws aren't followed much in reality. The biggest sites, sure, but most smaller sites are a mess under the hood. As long as something is "technically usable", even if very awkward and annoying, it's often hard to sue or anything like that. Maybe it's different in other countries though, I live in Australia.
Next time you use a website, try only using your keyboard to navigate it and accomplish your task, and you'll see what I mean. It's a rough test of how much they value accessibility. For example, many websites disable the border around what you're highlighting, so you have no idea what the tab button is about to click. Or popup windows don't actually change your tab selection, so you have to tab through literally the entire page in the background to get to the popup window. Stuff like that; technically usable but annoying as hell.
It is also very easy to detect surprising text by looking at the perplexity levels by feeding it to a very small model. If there's a problem, OCR/'screen read' it instead..