this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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What is a "verified crawler" though? What I worry about is, is it only big companies like Google that are allowed to have them now?
I assume a crawler which adheres to robots.txt
I would love to think so. But the word "verified" suggests more.
IP verification is a not uncommon method for commercial crawlers
Any accessibility service will also see the "hidden links", and while a blind person with a screen reader will notice if they wonder off into generated pages, it will waste their time too. Especially if they don't know about such "feature" they'll be very confused.
Also, I don't know about you, but I absolutely have a use for crawling X, Google maps, Reddit, YouTube, and getting information from there without interacting with the service myself.
Cloudflare isn't the best at blocking things. As long as your crawler isn't horribly misconfigured you shouldn't have much issues.