Why Agent Identity Matters
As AI crawlers proliferate, publishers need a way to distinguish legitimate bots from scrapers. Cryptographic identity is the answer.
The web is experiencing an identity crisis. Not among humans—we have passports, driver's licenses, and OAuth. The crisis is among machines.
The rise of AI crawlers
Every major AI company now operates crawlers that traverse the web, indexing content for training data, search augmentation, and real-time retrieval. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, GoogleBot, and dozens of others make billions of requests daily.
For publishers, this creates a fundamental problem: how do you know who's actually crawling your site?
User-agents are not identity
The current system relies on User-Agent strings—a self-declared identifier that any crawler can set to anything. A malicious scraper can claim to be GPTBot. A researcher can pretend to be GoogleBot. There's no verification.
This is like accepting a handwritten note as proof of identity.
The robots.txt limitation
robots.txt tells crawlers what they should do, but has no enforcement mechanism. It's a social contract, not a technical one. Crawlers that choose to ignore it face no consequences beyond reputational damage—if they're even identified.
Cryptographic identity changes the game
What if crawlers could prove who they are, cryptographically, with every request?
This is what OpenBotAuth enables. Crawlers register public keys. They sign their requests with their private keys. Publishers verify those signatures against the registered keys.
The result:
- Unforgeable identity: Signatures can't be spoofed
- Non-repudiation: If a request has a valid signature, you know exactly who sent it
- Granular control: Different policies for different crawlers
From blocking to business
Once you can reliably identify crawlers, new possibilities open up:
- Tiered access: Premium crawlers get higher rate limits
- Pay-per-crawl: Monetize AI training access directly
- Compliance: Know exactly who accessed what, when
The path forward
We're building the infrastructure for a web where machine identity is as robust as human identity. Open standards. No vendor lock-in. A level playing field for publishers and AI companies alike.
The agent economy needs agent identity. That's what OpenBotAuth provides.
Want to learn more? Check out our documentation or request access to OpenBotAuth Cloud.