A blog owner explains why visitors may be blocked from accessing their site, due to anti-crawler measures targeting old browser User-Agent strings. High-volume crawlers (often gathering LLM training data) frequently spoof outdated Chrome user agents, triggering blocks. The post also addresses edge cases: Inoreader and Feedly users seeing the block page due to those services fetching feeds with old User-Agent headers, Vivaldi users needing to adjust brand masking settings, and archive.today users being indistinguishable from malicious crawlers due to their use of old Chrome UAs and suspicious IP practices.
Table of contents
A special note to people using Inoreader (the feed reader)A special note to people using Feedly (the feed reader)A special note for people using VivaldiA special note for people using archive.*16 Impressions