A Brief Guide to Protecting Your Work

If your artwork is online, AI companies may try to scrape it to train models. Some bots ask permission, others ignore it. There’s no perfect protection but you can make it much harder for AI crawlers to use your work.

Here are some suggestions on what you can do to protect your work:

1. Start with the basics: robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file that tells robots (such as search engine indexers) how to behave, by instructing them not to crawl certain paths on the website. It can be used to instruct AI crawlers not to use your work. Unfortunately many crawlers ignore robots.txt but it is a good starting point.

How to do it:

1. Create a text file called robots.txt
2. Add this text:

3. Upload it to the root of your site (your web designer can do this)

• Good for: Big companies that respect these rules
• Limitations: Many scrapers ignore robots.txt entirely

2. Add stronger protection: use a CDN with bot-blocking

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) sits in front of your website and can block harmful traffic before it reaches your site. Popular options: Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, Bunny

Bot-blocking can stop:

• Automated scrapers pretending to be browsers
• Unknown or suspicious user agents
• High-speed “grab everything” crawler

Cloudflare quick steps:

1. Create a free Cloudflare account
2. Add your domain
3. Change nameservers to Cloudflare (your provider can help)
4. Turn on Bot Fight Mode
5. (Optional) Add rules to block specific AI bots (e.g., GPTBot)

Important: If you’re unsure about this process ask your hosting provider or someone who knows about DNS, mistakes can disrupt your website and / or email.

3. Add friction: make your images harder to misuse

These don’t stop scraping, but they reduce value or raise barriers:

• Add watermarks (small, subtle, but present)
• Keep high-resolution images behind a login
• Show only low-res previews publicly
• Add copyright notices in your footer and on image pages
• Keep metadata on your images when possible (some sites strip it)

4. Know the limits: no tool is perfect

The University of California study found:

• Even artists with technical skills struggle with these tools
• Many platforms don’t allow editing robots.txt
• Some AI bots ignore rules entirely
• CDNs help but don’t block every possible crawler
• Legal protections are improving — but still developing

This is about layered defence, not one magic solution.

5. Respond if you find your work used without consent

You can use:

• DMCA takedown requests (USA)
• GDPR/CCPA “right to deletion” requests
• Platform-specific reporting tools (e.g., Instagram, Pinterest)
• Direct notices to AI companies requesting removal

6. If unsure, ask for help

Ask your web designer or hosting company: “I want to set up AI-bot blocking and improve my protection from web scraping.”

They should be able to help with:

• robots.txt
• Cloudflare setup
• Firewall rules
• Image-protection tools