Ryabitsev: Creepy crawlies

Konstantin Ryabitsev reports that AI crawlers now dominate traffic to the Linux kernel repositories at git.kernel.org, with only about 2% of the roughly 6 million daily requests being legitimate. Of the daily requests, 66% are blocked by the Anubis challenge, but 33% solve it and reach the main site, indicating scrapers are expending significant computational resources to access the data.

Konstantin Ryabitsev has written a blog post with hard numbers https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/creepy-crawlies about the impact of AI crawlers on the Linux kernel repositories at git.kernel.org https://git.kernel.org/ : Today, git.kernel.org receives about 6M daily requests demanding to see random commits. Of these, 66% are still immediately batted away with the Anubis challenge, but 33% are now solving the math and getting through to the main site — because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge. It's impossible to tell with certainty which of these are bots and which are real humans — but chances are, if it's asking for an old commit in a random old fork, it's probably not a real developer trying to do their work. With a bunch of generous assumptions, legitimate requests are only about 2% of git.kernel.org traffic — everything else are scrapers.