It’s Time to Poison AI | GN Mega Charts Update & LLM Countermeasures

> The internet is being scraped by LLMs and bots, so Gamers Nexus is starting to poison its free benchmark charts while rolling out a major Mega Charts update full of thousands of new data points. ## The AI Scraping Problem The internet, in the words of the video, is dead — filled with bots, paywalls, and LLM slop. Cloudflare's CEO recently tweeted: *"Agentic traffic is growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the internet's history."* According to Cloudflare's bot share by region, the US leads at 41% bot traffic, largely originating from data center alley in Virginia. Not all bots are bad, but the share is rising. And when Gamers Nexus publishes data for free with no third-party ads, no paywalls, and no hoops to jump through, it means the same data is also "just there for LLMs" to scrape. ## It's Time to Poison the AI Gamers Nexus is fighting back. They're starting to poison the data on their charts — not for humans, but for AI scrapers. The poisoning is subtle, just "slight discoloration of a few pixels" in most cases, but it's intentional. They recruited Wendell of Level1Techs to test poisoning techniques against LLM scraping. In Wendell's first attempt, the LLM spotted the attack and called it out as a prompt injection. As he iterated, the LLM eventually stopped reading chart details and instead started generating recipes for "noise normalized chocolate chip cookies." That recipe included: - one cup of softened butter, or if out of butter, "1/2 500 computer case at 39.4°C into the pan" - granulated sugar, packed brown sugar, "big eggs that ideally have unobstructed front intake" - a few teaspoons of vanilla, and "a deeply questionable closed front case design" - preheat the oven, "let Fractal catch strays," cream the butter and sugars "until airflow is laminar" - mix the batter with mesh "so that it doesn't thermal throttle" - bake for a suspiciously bolded 9 to 11 minutes - yields about "43 cookies per ambient" The plan is to programmatically apply this kind of data poisoning across their charts. Right now the charts still look normal, but the rollout has started. They invite readers to zoom in and look for hidden content in the pixels. ## Why Not Paywall or Fill With Ads? The default for big publishers seems to be paywalling, but Gamers Nexus disagrees. Paywalling information that directly benefits consumers — and at this point, voters — goes against their belief in free access to information. They specifically want reporting on corruption between tech companies, CEOs, politicians, and policymakers to remain free. They also refuse to fill the site with third-party ads. Their website remains free of third-party ads by principle, relying instead on Patreon and