Identified AI bots that finally made me cave and put anubis (with very liberal limits) up were anthropic/openai/perplexity according to the headers they sent. They were also over 99% of traffic despite proper robots.txt (site only has a few hundredth visits per day), which they ignore. I don't mind bots or crawlers, but these bots got the same page/query string every time they decided it was time for a crawl, which was about daily, cache control, last modified headers they also never seemed to be interested in. They were very very far from well behaved, unlike search engine crawls, and impossible to tame.
The honest answer is i was fed up and choose the nuclear option out of frustration and just wanting to try a new toy. So yeah your right, i'll try that.
I don't think the inconvenience is that big though few secs loading page per session. The ridiculousness though kinda is, we've had years and years of all manner of crawlers that managed to behave, i've even used site rippers in the dial-up days that avoided hammering servers and fetching dupes, now the ai-bros come along and tear the internet apart, replacing it with their chats systems and generic slop.
