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There is an interesting article about AI tarpits that addresses a similar issue: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-...

The argument is basically to have them scrape your website indefinitely wasting their resources for the bots that decide to ignore your robots.txt (or any bot if you desire)

I wonder whether the path in the robots.txt (or maybe a <link> tag with a bogus rel attribute) would already be enough to make evil bots follow it. That would at least avoid accidental follows due to CSS/ARIA not properly working in weird constellations

> <a href="/honeypot" style="display:none" aria-hidden="true">ban me</a>

Unrelated meta question but is the aria tag necessarily since display: none; should be removing the content from the flow?

I would hope that all screen readers would respect display:none. The aria-hidden is for CYA, banning even one blind user would be quite bad optics (as is this sentence now that I think about it).

While this may work today, the bots now more and more use if not the full headless rendering then at least apply CSS rules not to fetch invisible content.

I like this. Adding now. Thanks!