The quick version:
Cloudflare reports blocking 416 billion AI bot requests since last July.
Google crawls roughly 3.2x more webpages than OpenAI.
The scale is pushing serious scraping toward residential and mobile IPs that blend in.
The scale
The numbers are staggering. Cloudflare says it has blocked 416 billion AI bot requests since last July alone, and Google is crawling about 3.2 times more pages than OpenAI. The open web is now being read by machines at a volume humans cannot match, and the defenses are scaling up to match.
What it changes for scraping
When anti-bot systems are filtering at this scale, the cheap, obvious approaches stop working. Datacenter IP ranges get recognized and blocked quickly.
That is why legitimate, public-data collection keeps shifting toward residential and mobile IPs that carry real usage histories and look like ordinary visitors, paired with respectful rate limits.
The honest read
This is an arms race, and it rewards doing things properly. Collect public data, identify yourself honestly where you should, rate limit so you are not part of the problem, and use access that looks genuinely human rather than hammering a site from a flagged range.
Teams sharing benchmarks on Reddit consistently report that a realistic, respectful setup beats brute force, both on success rate and on staying out of trouble.
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