How to Protect Your Content From AI Scraping
AI companies are scraping the internet at unprecedented scale. Here's a practical guide to protecting your creative work from unauthorized AI training, uncredited use, and content theft.
Protecting your content from AI requires a multi-layered approach: (1) establish proof of authorship before publishing, (2) use technical measures like robots.txt and meta tags, (3) apply invisible watermarks, and (4) monitor for unauthorized use. Stelais provides blockchain-backed proof of authorship and invisible watermarking that persists even when your content is copied.
Step-by-Step Protection Guide
Establish Proof Before Publishing
The most important step—create verifiable proof of authorship before sharing your work anywhere.
Why this matters: Once your content is online, proving you created it first becomes difficult. Screenshots and file dates can be faked. You need cryptographic, timestamped proof.
How Stelais helps: Upload your content before publishing. Stelais generates a cryptographic fingerprint and anchors it to the blockchain with an immutable timestamp.
Apply Invisible Watermarks
Embed ownership information that survives copying and compression.
Why this matters: When your content is reposted, screenshot, or modified, visible watermarks are removed. Invisible watermarks persist.
How Stelais helps: Stelais applies steganographic watermarks that are imperceptible to viewers but can be detected to prove ownership.
Configure Technical Barriers
Use robots.txt, meta tags, and headers to signal your preferences to AI crawlers.
Important caveat: These are signals, not enforcement. Legitimate AI companies may respect them, but there's no guarantee.
# robots.txt
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /
Monitor and Enforce
Track where your content appears and take action when necessary.
What to monitor: Reverse image search, social media monitoring, and AI-generated content that mimics your style.
Enforcement options: DMCA takedowns, platform reports, and legal action—all strengthened by your Stelais proof.
What Stelais Provides
Blockchain Timestamp
Immutable proof of when your content was registered, verified by the Arweave network.
Cryptographic Fingerprint
Unique hash that proves the exact content you registered—detects any modifications.
Invisible Watermark
Steganographic marks that persist through copying, compression, and format conversion.
Public Verification
Shareable proof page that anyone can use to verify your ownership claim.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- ✕Publishing first, protecting later
Once content is public, proving you created it first becomes much harder. Always register before publishing.
- ✕Relying only on visible watermarks
Visible watermarks are easily removed with AI tools. Invisible watermarks provide actual protection.
- ✕Trusting robots.txt alone
robots.txt is a suggestion, not enforcement. Many scrapers ignore it entirely.
- ✕Using file metadata as proof
EXIF data and file dates are trivially editable. They're not reliable proof of authorship.