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 old Chrome user agents, prompting the site owner to block them. The post also addresses edge cases: Inoreader and Feedly users seeing the block page due to those services fetching feeds with outdated user agents, Vivaldi users needing to adjust their User-Agent Brand Masking setting, and archive.today users being indistinguishable from malicious crawlers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.*59 Impressions