Recently I’ve found that the main website (at www.mentalhealthlaw.co.uk) is sometimes too slow to be usable, and occasionally just displays an error message. This is because of crawlers – likely AI crawlers – from all over the world.
I’ve started adding a password temporarily so that only I can access the website when working on it. I try only to do that out of office hours, but it’s not a good long-term solution.
Next I plan to try a service called Cloudflare which is meant to help, but will mean having to click a “Verify you are human” box occasionally.
If the problem gets worse rather then better then it might be necessary to make the website a subscription service. I don’t know how that would work, but maybe it could be tied in with the CPD scheme.
Here’s an article which I found tonight but explains the situation well: Steven J Vaughan-Nichols, ‘AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending hunger for any and all content: But the cure may ruin the web…’ (The Register, 29 August 2025).
Any ideas?