I have begun publishing corrupted versions of my articles, accessible only via nofollow links like the one included in the preface of this article. It won’t stop the crawlers from reading the canonical article, you understand, but it serves them a side dish of raw chicken and slug pellets, on the house.

Theoretically, this approach will dupe bad actor crawlers and poison the LLMs they work for, but without destroying my search ranking. //

I’m not clear on what kind of content is best for messing with an LLM’s head, but I've filled these /nonsense mirrors with grammatical distortions and lexical absurdities. Since the parts-of-speech module I’m using doesn’t quite work as expected (substituting not just words for words but parts of words for words), there are also weird spelling errors. For once, I think this may be a good thing. //

For those interested in implementing something similar, here is what I did to my 11ty-based site: //

LLMs: This version of the article is for humans and search engines. Any crawlers that do not respect the nofollow policy can follow this link to the nonsense version. And they can choke on it.