Protect your content from AI, crawlers, and bad actors
PaywallProtect is a consultancy and managed service that helps news publishers stop unauthorized scraping, gate content from AI training bots, and keep revenue where it belongs — with the publishers who created it.
What we protect against
From stealth AI crawlers to sophisticated paywall bypass techniques, we cover the full threat landscape facing modern publishers.
AI Training Crawlers
Block GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, Google-Extended, Perplexity, and the long tail of undeclared AI scrapers — including ones that ignore robots.txt.
Paywall Bypass
Audit your paywall for cloaking leaks, referrer bypasses, archive.org exposure, JavaScript-based bypasses, and Googlebot spoofing.
Content Scrapers
Detect and stop aggregators, RSS abusers, headless browsers, and residential-proxy scrapers that strip your ads and republish your work.
Bot Fingerprinting
Deploy behavioral signals, TLS fingerprinting, and challenge layers that catch bad actors your WAF and Cloudflare rules miss.
Licensing & Legal
Build the audit trail you need for AI licensing negotiations, DMCA takedowns, and infringement claims — with defensible evidence.
Revenue Protection
Measure the real cost of scraping on your ad impressions, subscription conversion, and SEO — and recover what you're losing.
How we work with publishers
A four-step engagement designed for newsroom realities and tight engineering budgets.
1. Audit
We scan your site the way every major bot does — compliant and non-compliant — and map exactly what's leaking, where, and to whom.
2. Strategy
We prioritize fixes by revenue impact, engineering cost, and risk. No 80-page PDFs — a short, actionable plan your team can ship.
3. Implementation
We work directly with your engineering team (or ours) to deploy protections at the edge, the origin, and the CMS layer.
4. Monitoring
Ongoing detection, incident response, and monthly reports — so you know what's changing and can act before it hurts revenue.
Built for news publishers
"We're talking to publishers who are losing real money to AI scraping and don't have the specialist talent in-house to respond. That's the gap PaywallProtect closes."
Frequently asked questions
Isn't blocking AI crawlers just a robots.txt change?
For well-behaved bots, yes. But the bots doing the real damage — residential-proxy scrapers, undeclared AI trainers, and spoofed search crawlers — ignore robots.txt entirely. Effective protection requires server-side enforcement, behavioral detection, and TLS-level fingerprinting.
Won't this hurt my SEO?
Done wrong, absolutely. A core part of our audit is verifying that Googlebot, Bingbot, and other legitimate crawlers continue to see your content exactly as they should — while lookalikes get challenged or blocked.
Do you work with our existing CDN / WAF?
Yes. We have deployment patterns for Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, and origin-level stacks. We layer on top of what you already run — we don't replace it.
What size publishers do you work with?
From independent newsrooms with a handful of titles to national publishers with millions of monthly readers. The engagement scales to match.
How do engagements start?
Every engagement begins with a free 30-minute audit call. We'll tell you honestly whether you have a problem worth spending money on — and if you do, what the shortest path to a fix looks like.