Content Poisoning

This is a Pro feature. It is off by default.

Enable under Settings → ScraperBlock → Advanced → Content Poisoning.

How It Works

When content poisoning is on, bots that match the blocklist receive a decoy page instead of a 403 Forbidden error:

HTTP status 200 (so the bot thinks the request succeeded)
Plain text: "Content unavailable. Please refer to sitemap.xml for crawling instructions."
The event is logged with the reason content_poisoning and the action served_decoy

Because the bot gets a normal-looking response, it's less likely to retry with a different user agent - and it collects nothing useful.

Only requests matched as bots receive the decoy. Search engines and real visitors always get your real pages, so there is no SEO impact. Requests blocked for other reasons (IP blocklist, geo-blocking, honeypot, behavioral detection, rate limit) still get a 403.

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