# 📊 How to Protect Your Data from AI Crawlers

## Metadata

- **Published:** 9/22/2023
- **Duration:** 9 minutes
- **YouTube URL:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=TsUYGs_PCYY
- **Channel:** nerding.io

## Description

In this video, I discuss the importance of protecting your data from AI crawlers and provide insights on how to do it effectively. I explain the concept of AI crawlers and their role in indexing web pages. I also introduce the robots.txt file and its significance in allowing or disallowing access to your website. Additionally, I explore the proposed AI.txt standard and its potential impact on data protection. Watch this video to learn practical strategies for safeguarding your data from AI crawlers.

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🎥 Chapters
00:00 Introduction
02:09 Understanding AI Crawlers
02:41 The Role of Robots.txt
04:44 Protecting Against OpenAI User
06:43 The Proposed AI.txt Standard

🔗 Links
https://netfuture.ch/2023/07/blocking-ai-crawlers-robots-txt-chatgpt/
https://platform.openai.com/docs/gptbot
https://platform.openai.com/docs/plugins/bot
https://site.spawning.ai/spawning-ai-txt

⤵️ Let's Connect
https://everefficient.ai
https://nerding.io
https://twitter.com/nerding_io
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jdfiscus/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/ever-efficient-ai/

## Key Highlights

### 1. Robots.txt for AI Crawlers

The video explains how to use robots.txt to control AI crawler access, similar to SEO, by specifying user agents like 'GPTBot' and disallowing specific directories or files.

### 2. Dynamic Robots.txt Generation

Demonstrates creating a dynamic robots.txt file using Node.js and Express, enabling conditional disallowing based on real-time data or application logic.

### 3. AI.txt Proposed Standard

Introduces the AI.txt proposal as a future standard (not yet implemented) for specifying allowed content types for AI crawlers, offering more granular control.

### 4. Protecting Specific File Types

Highlights the importance of disallowing specific file types (e.g., .txt, .png, .pdf) in robots.txt or AI.txt to prevent AI models from indexing sensitive data.


## Summary

## Video Summary: How to Protect Your Data from AI Crawlers

**1. Executive Summary:**
This video explains the importance of protecting your data from AI crawlers, similar to how SEO manages indexing for search engines. It covers using `robots.txt` to control crawler access and introduces the proposed `AI.txt` standard for more granular content-type control, enabling users to prevent sensitive data from being indexed by AI models.

**2. Main Topics Covered:**

*   **Understanding AI Crawlers:** Explanation of AI crawlers and their role in indexing web content for training AI models. Specific crawlers like GPTBot and OpenAI User are mentioned.
*   **The Role of `robots.txt`:** Detailed explanation of how `robots.txt` functions to allow or disallow access to specific parts of a website, using user-agent directives and disallow rules.
*   **Protecting Against OpenAI User (Plugins):** Focus on differentiating between the regular GPTBot and the OpenAI User agent used specifically for plugins, and how to block them both.
*   **Dynamic `robots.txt` Generation:** Demonstration using Node.js and Express to create a dynamic `robots.txt` file, allowing for conditional rules based on real-time data.
*   **The Proposed `AI.txt` Standard:** Introduction of the `AI.txt` proposal as a future standard for specifying allowed content types for AI crawlers, offering more precise control over data indexing.
*   **Protecting Specific File Types:** The importance of preventing specific file types (e.g., `.txt`, `.png`, `.pdf`) from being indexed using `robots.txt` or the proposed `AI.txt`.

**3. Key Takeaways:**

*   Use `robots.txt` to manage AI crawler access by specifying user agents (e.g., `GPTBot`, `OpenAI-User`) and disallowing specific directories or files.
*   Dynamic `robots.txt` generation allows for more flexible control based on real-time data or application logic.
*   The proposed `AI.txt` standard offers more granular control over which content types AI crawlers can access.
*   Protect sensitive data by disallowing specific file types that might contain valuable information from being indexed by AI models.
*   Keep an eye on the adoption of `AI.txt` as a potential future standard.

**4. Notable Quotes or Examples:**

*   "You can think of it as how SEO Works basically you have a file on your server which is called a robot txt and that allows things like the googlebot for search to actually go out and index your pages."
*   Example: `User-agent: GPTBot`, `Disallow: /private/` (Blocking GPTBot from the /private/ directory).
*   Example: `Disallow: *.txt` or `Disallow: *.png` (Blocking all text and image files, which shows use of wild cards to specify file types.)

**5. Target Audience:**

*   Website owners and developers concerned about data privacy and the use of their content by AI models.
*   Individuals interested in learning about controlling AI crawler access to their websites.
*   Professionals responsible for managing SEO and data protection for organizations.


## Full Transcript

hey everyone welcome to nerding IO I'm JD and today what we're going to talk about is how to look at AI crawlers and protect some of your data so what this means is you can think of it as how SEO Works basically you have a file on your server which is called a robot txt and that allows things like the googlebot for search to actually go out and index your pages so that you can show up in their their search algorithm the way traditionally that you can allow or disallow that is using this robot's txt file there's also things like a meta tag which can affect some of the like social embedding and things like that or a link where you have the attribute Rel nofollow so in the Advent of AI and its ability to collect a bunch of different information it's going out and crawling the the internet in order to attain that information index it and then process it through through the algorithms and Vector storage so if there's sensitive information that we don't want to be indexed or maybe that we we don't want to show up in AI specifically you know it's not really using references just yet so it's a way of protection and so what we're going to go through today is uh I found this website that has been updated recently it kind of shows a couple of different crawlers and how they're being utilized so there's two different things first is the robots txt and then there's also this proposal for an AI dot txt so we're going to go through both of these please remember to like And subscribe if if you enjoy this content and provide any suggestions of things that you'd like us to go over so first we're going to go over our AI crawlers so what this means is you have the common crawler a cc bot open AI had its own bot but then it got separated it's it has a GPT bot and the GPT user which is specifically for their plugins so you want to protect against both of these if you don't want your site called by open AI the other thing is that Google bar doesn't have a separate caller for it's just using the robots txt and then for meta uh the Llama there's there's no information just yet so what we're going to do is we're going to protect and make a dynamic robot txt to look at open aigpt so let's look at the specification for both the GPT bot and the chat GPT bot the first thing is to look at the fact that it has its own user agent so we know it's going to have a user agent token of GPT bot and our it's going to be a Mozilla webkit as the the browser type or the user agent string the the way to disallow this is just to put a user agent bot and then disallow but there's also ways to say okay well I want specific content to be allowed and specific content to be disallowed so let's take a second and put together a dynamic we're just going to use node in this example a dynamic way to generate robot.txt all right so here's an example of just using Express and creating a robot txt file right here we're saying all user agents are allowed but we're disallowing Secrets kind of like a general practice so if we wanted to add specifically the user GP or the GPT bot we would just copy this here and we can just add it to our script and now we know that maybe we want to allow everything and we want to disallow uh something outside of secret maybe we'll just say private uh to make it a little bit different and then we can do the same thing with the openai user GPT remember this is a user agent for specifically for the the plugins that open AI has so you want to protect against both it's still using a similar user agent full string it's just has this little piece that's a little bit different and we can just say that we just are are addressing the chat GPT user so maybe in this instance we just want to say we're we're going to disallow everything we can go ahead and do that and now we're just going to copy it again over to our our index and now the GPT user is disallowed from everything we could also add you know the allow like we did previously up here if we want to get a little more specific but I just want to show that there's you know different options that you can do all right so now we're going to save and we can just run this and we have our port and we can see that when we go to localhost 3000 and we have ROBLOX txt it should be generated so let's go ahead and do that cool and so this way now we have our our robots txt you could obviously just make this its own file the only reason that I wanted to try it Dynamic is just to show that we can actually determine logic up here so let's say that as we're dynamically building uh different blog posts or anything specific we could actually load that information and have for instance a specific category that maybe is is private or or like a particular uh ID range or date range there's all different kinds of options that we could do in order to make this dynamic cool so now we have our robot txt let's go back and look at what is being proposed for this ai.txt so you can see that this was updated in at the end of August and it's an upcoming standard so it's not quite implemented yet and it's basically an EU directive so what this is and they have this generator which we're just going to take a look at and has a great explanation about what an AI text file is again this is a proposed standard that is is uh is not fully in place yet but you can see with the generator it has some specifics and these are also really good practices that you could put into your roblox.txt file so if we take a look at like maybe we're just looking at text files or we're just looking at HTML you can actually add those as part of your txt file here so you see how you have the star you can do something like let's say down here we'll just say disallow slash jar txt or star PNG right both of those would be acceptable so you can use this AI dot text we'll just go ahead and turn some of these off uh you can even do audio files and code which is really interesting and then we'll just download this example and this is what it's generating for us so you can see the specifics let's blow this up a little bit we can see that it's saying all user agents so just like before it's specifying everything and then it's actually doing this wild card or a star to Define all of these different file types that could be looked at right so when we did text it's showing the specific txt file which we looked at but it also is saying you know docs and PDFs and and all these different things so this is a really great way to protect specific files against the AI crawlers as a proposed solution and then we also have our robot.txt example of really specifying even down to the user agent of the specific AI Crawlers that's it for today uh if you liked this content please like And subscribe and we'll see you again soon

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