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How to block bot traffic from US ISP residential IP?

         

gronetwork

3:27 pm on Mar 27, 2026 (gmt 0)

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How do you block bots (probably AI data scrapers) from US ISP residential IP (Comcast, Charter, Verizon, AT&T)?

Each IP is unique and has a regular web user agent. They are coming by the hundreds of thousands (1 million+ IP per day) and are crashing my server. For the moment I am blocking IP ranges (few over hundreds of IP ranges), but it is also blocking real visitors.

Solutions with and without Cloudflare; I have observed that some websites are using hcaptcha (for the entire website), instead of Cloudflare.

not2easy

5:44 pm on Mar 27, 2026 (gmt 0)

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IMHO, hCaptcha is a good way to block bots without blocking IPs, especially useful for traffic that uses residential ISP IPs. Their easy (for humans) questions are less pita than those using images, where I'm often looking at vehicles and guessing whether I'm supposed to include the square with just an antenna.