feat(rate-limit): bypass per-IP throttle for known AI crawler UAs - #615
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Adds Meta-ExternalAgent, Meta-ExternalFetcher, cohere-ai, Perplexity-User (all already in robots.txt), plus AI2Bot, Ai2Bot-Dolma, Kagibot, FacebookBot, MistralAI-User, TimpiBot, Webzio-Extended for completeness. Comment now states the regex must stay in sync with src/app/robots.ts. Western LLM coverage is at ~95 percent after this. Chinese models other than ByteDance (Bytespider) do not publish a documented bot UA, so they fetch via generic browser UAs and stay throttled by design.
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…) (#617) * feat(rate-limit): bypass per-IP throttle for known AI crawler user agents * rate-limit: expand AI bot allowlist to match robots.txt Adds Meta-ExternalAgent, Meta-ExternalFetcher, cohere-ai, Perplexity-User (all already in robots.txt), plus AI2Bot, Ai2Bot-Dolma, Kagibot, FacebookBot, MistralAI-User, TimpiBot, Webzio-Extended for completeness. Comment now states the regex must stay in sync with src/app/robots.ts. Western LLM coverage is at ~95 percent after this. Chinese models other than ByteDance (Bytespider) do not publish a documented bot UA, so they fetch via generic browser UAs and stay throttled by design.
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AI crawlers (PerplexityBot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc.) often share a small
pool of egress IPs across many user queries. The per-IP rate limit on
/api/citable, /api/llm-context, /llms-full.txt (which re-exports
llm-context), /api/stat/[slug], /api/mcp/[transport] and adjacent
read-only endpoints was triggering 429 responses to legitimate AI
citation fetches, lowering OCB visibility in Perplexity, ChatGPT search,
Claude, and Google AI Overviews.
This change adds a User-Agent allowlist in rate-limit.ts. Requests with
a known AI crawler UA bypass the throttle without consuming a token.
Human traffic and unknown UAs remain throttled. UA spoofing is possible
but the read-only nature of these endpoints makes it a non-concern: we
WANT to be cited.
Allowlist patterns (case-insensitive substring match): GPTBot,
ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, Claude-Web,
PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, GoogleOther, CCBot, Bytespider,
Applebot-Extended, Amazonbot, Diffbot, YouBot, DuckAssistBot.
Optional
AI_BYPASS_DEBUG=trueenv var enables a one-line console logper bypass for debugging.
Adds tests covering: known AI UA bypasses a drained bucket, default
Chrome UA still throttled after capacity, missing UA defaults to
throttled, omitting the optional req argument keeps original behaviour.
Validation: