AI scrapers are hiding behind referrer spam

Back in the day, referrer spam used to be a means to trick a website publisher into thinking another website was sending visitors their way. It’s something I’ve seen often. I’ll be looking through my referrer logs, and see traffic apparently emanating from a website, usually one I’ve not heard of before. At first I’d be stoked. Someone had found my website and liked it enough to share with their readers. Awesome. And of course I’d fallen for the ruse and gone to the supposedly referring website, only to learn there was no sign of a link to mine. I’ve never tried to make another blogger believe I’ve linked to their website when I haven’t, so I don’t know what’s involved in engineering referrer spam. But it seems like a lot of trouble to score what might be a single visit from someone who’ll probably never return. However, there are, or were, some websites posting lists of their traffic sources. This might prompt a visit from whoever looks at that information. This referrer list…