Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

This is a user agent and I would be incredibly frustrated if they respected robots.txt. Robots.txt was designed to encourage recursive web crawlers to be respectful. It's specifically not meant to exclude agents that are acting on users' direct requests.

Website operators should not get a say in what kinds of user agents I used to access their sites. Terminal? Fine. Regular web browser? Okay. AI powered web browser? Who cares. The strength of the web lies in the fact that I can access it with many different kinds of tools depending on my use case, and we cannot sacrifice that strength on the altar of hatred of AI tools.

Down that road lies disaster, with the Play Integrity API being just the tip of the iceberg.

https://www.robotstxt.org/faq/what.html






Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: