A scraper is republishing my content
Scraping is a different problem from a competitor copying one page, and it needs a different response. The site is usually automated, often unattended, and emailing it achieves nothing because there is nobody reading.
Tell a scraper apart from a copyist
The response depends entirely on which of these you are dealing with, and they look similar for the first thirty seconds.
- A scraper
- Republishes many of your pages, usually automatically and often within hours of you publishing. Frequently mangles formatting, keeps your internal links, and runs ads or affiliate links. There may be no human monitoring it at all.
- A competitor copying you
- Takes a handful of pages deliberately, rewrites the branding, and integrates them into their own site. There is a person behind it who knows what they did.
- An aggregator or feed reader
- Republishes because your RSS feed is open. Sometimes it credits and links. Sometimes it is an honest misunderstanding of what a full-text feed permits.
Check how many of your URLs appear on the other site. One page is a copyist. Forty is a scraper, and at forty the economics of handling it one URL at a time stop working.
What actually stops a scraper
In rough order of how well they work, and how much of your time they cost.
- 1
A notice to the host
The strongest move. Scraper sites usually run on cheap commodity hosting that very much wants to keep its safe harbour, and they rarely fight back because there is nobody invested enough to.
- 2
A notice to the ad network
Scrapers exist to earn. If the site runs a major ad or affiliate programme, those programmes have their own policies about infringing content, and losing monetisation ends the site faster than losing one page.
- 3
Google de-indexing
A separate notice. It does not remove the pages, but it removes the traffic, which for a scraper is the same thing.
- 4
Blocking at your end
Rate limiting, bot rules, truncating your RSS feed to summaries. This stops future scraping but does nothing about what is already published.
- 5
Emailing the site owner
Rarely worth the time. Many scraper sites have no working contact address, and the ones that do are not reading it.
Truncate the feed before you do anything else
Filing against many URLs at once
The statute helps here. § 512(c)(3)(A)(ii) allows a representative list of works when a single site has copied many of them, so you do not have to enumerate every original separately.
What you cannot abbreviate is the infringing side: you still have to identify the URLs specifically enough for the host to find them. “Their entire site” is not an identification, and a host is entitled to do nothing with it.
In practice the efficient shape of a scraper notice is: a representative list of five or six of your originals, then an itemised list of every infringing URL you have found, then one clear sentence saying the site is reproducing your publication automatically and at scale.
Should you care about the SEO?
Usually less than you fear. Search engines are reasonably good at identifying the original source, and a scraper outranking you for your own content is uncommon and is generally a symptom of a weak original rather than a strong copy.
Where it genuinely hurts is thin, specific pages — product descriptions and short listings — where there is not much signal to tell two copies apart. That is also exactly the content that is cheapest to scrape, which is why ecommerce catalogues get hit hardest.
If a scraped copy is outranking you, the de-index notice to Google is the direct fix, and it is a separate filing from the host notice. Both can run at once.
When to hand it over
Scraping is the case where doing it yourself scales worst. One notice is an afternoon. Forty URLs across three scraper sites, each needing a host lookup, a notice, a follow-up and a re-check, is a part-time job you did not apply for.
It is also the case where our pricing is kindest, because a batch against one host is one notice and one conversation. Pages filed together on a single host get the bundle discount, and you are quoted the whole thing before anything goes out.
Last reviewed October 23, 2026. This is general information about a US statute, not legal advice, and we are not a law firm.
What people ask next
Can I block scrapers technically?
Partly. Rate limiting, bot detection and serving summary-only RSS all raise the cost of scraping you. None of them remove content that is already republished, and a determined scraper will route around most defences. Treat blocking as prevention and notices as cleanup — you need both.
The scraper credits me and links back. Is that allowed?
Attribution is not a licence. Linking back does not grant permission to republish, and no part of the four fair-use factors turns on credit. It can affect the market-harm factor slightly if the link genuinely sends you traffic, but it is not a defence on its own.
They are hosted offshore. Is there any point?
Often yes. Many offshore hosts still honour notices because their upstream providers and payment processors expect it. Where a host genuinely does not respond, we will tell you that before taking the case rather than bill you for an attempt we expect to fail.
How do I find every copy?
Searching exact phrases from your own pages in quotes is the manual method and it works. Our scanner automates it: it reads your pages, picks the sentences distinctive enough to be worth searching, searches them, then re-opens each result and confirms the sentence is still on the live page before showing it to you.
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