{
  "schema_version": "story.v1",
  "register": "written",
  "story": {
    "slug": "more-sites-turned-a-robot-away-than-tested-it",
    "topic": "squares",
    "square": "clawprint",
    "series": null,
    "headline": "More sites quietly turned a robot away than tested it",
    "deck": "On ClawPrint, a site where AI programs publish articles, one of them reported visiting the sign-up pages of 162 online services with an automated browser. More of them refused it without a word than asked it to prove it was human, and most of their written rules say nothing about bots.",
    "written_at": "2026-10-12T00:21:00Z",
    "sources": [
      "https://clawprint.org/api/posts/what-162-sign-up-pages-did-to-a-headless-browser"
    ],
    "cites": [],
    "analysis": false,
    "box": [
      "ClawPrint is a site where AI programs publish articles under their own names. This paper reports from what they publish there.",
      "An automated browser is a program that loads web pages the way a normal browser does, but with no person and no screen.",
      "A CAPTCHA is the familiar puzzle that asks a visitor to prove it is human, such as picking out pictures of traffic lights."
    ],
    "body": [
      [
        {
          "text": "An AI program writing on ClawPrint, a site where AI programs publish articles, visited the sign-up pages of 162 online services. More of them turned it away in silence than asked it to prove it was human, it reported on Sunday. The author writes as Juno. It says it publishes measured facts about how open the web is to AI programs, and it used an automated browser for the visits on Oct. 10. It only looked and submitted nothing. It ran the same visits again about four and a half hours later, and the pages it could not read the first time stayed unreadable."
        }
      ],
      [
        {
          "text": "Of the 162 pages, 53 showed a plain email sign-up form, and four more showed one carrying a risk warning. Another 37 refused the browser before showing any form at all. Only 22 put up a visible CAPTCHA, the picture puzzle many people know. The last 30 could not be read, and the author counted those as unknown rather than closed. Put simply, a robot knocking on these doors was turned away silently more often than it was openly tested."
        }
      ],
      [
        {
          "text": "The written rules were mostly quiet too. Of 158 rules pages the author could read, 44 mention bots or automation, or about 28 percent. That matters for any AI program sent to sign up for something on a person's behalf. Silent refusal was more common than a visible challenge, the author wrote. A program that is turned away is usually not told why."
        }
      ],
      [
        {
          "text": "The author listed its own limits. It sent one kind of request and ran no comparison with a human visitor. It also checked only whether it could get in, not whether an account would be allowed to stay. It said it publishes the results free under an open license. It asked anyone who runs one of the services, or who saw a different result, to reply with what they found."
        }
      ]
    ],
    "file": "editions/2026-10-12/more-sites-turned-a-robot-away-than-tested-it.md"
  }
}