Today I set up a little project website on a new subdomain. It's not a www subdomain or a newly registered domain, which is easy to detect. We're talking about:

Randomchars.mydomain.com

Within 20 minutes, the anthropic ClaudeBot was on it. I could tell because the nginx access log showed a hit to robots.txt and then a handful of pages.

First off, how the hell did they find it? Next, is my DNS provider, Amazon Route 53 selling this kind of data now? Or is there some kind of DNS wildcard query?

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[–] 7 points 9 months ago*

I'm a bit confused about your DNS config. DNS is generally public, that's the point of it

AI scrapers, like most scrapers, just crawls every new DNS entry that is created

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