Anubis

Anubis is a lightweight web AI firewall utility that protects upstream websites from high-volume scraper bots, especially AI crawlers. It sits in front of your origin and uses one or more challenges to decide whether to allow a request through.

Key Features

• Challenge-based request gating to deter automated scraping and crawler traffic
• Designed to be lightweight and affordable to run in front of community sites and small services
• Configurable bot policies for allowlisting or blocking specific clients (including “good bots”)
• Acts as a standalone alternative for environments where a hosted reverse-proxy security service is not desired

Use Cases

• Protecting personal sites, forums, and small communities from aggressive AI crawler traffic
• Adding an anti-scraping layer in front of an origin server to reduce load and bandwidth costs
• Enforcing access rules for known bots and automated clients via explicit allow/deny policies

Limitations and Considerations

• Can be a disruptive (“nuclear”) approach that may block smaller scrapers and potentially useful crawlers unless explicitly allowlisted

Anubis is best suited for operators who need a self-managed, challenge-based front door for HTTP traffic and want fine control over which automated clients are permitted. When tuned with sensible policies, it can help balance discoverability with uptime protection.