Are you a real person? 28% of visits now blocked by bot checks: your clicks and cash may be at stake

A sudden pop-up asks if you’re real, your screen stalls, and your coffee goes cold. You’re not alone this morning.

Across major news sites, readers face fresh verification walls as publishers fight industrial-scale scraping and fraud. The shift safeguards journalism budgets, but it also interrupts loyal audiences who only wanted a quick read.

Why you keep getting challenged

Publishers say automated tools raid pages at scale, copying articles, headlines and metadata for resale, AI training, spam networks and ad fraud. That activity drains revenue, slows pages and can trigger security alarms. To stop it, websites now run stricter checks that flag unusual patterns before content loads.

Those checks look at pace, clicks, device signals and network reputation. If your behaviour fits known bot patterns—too fast, too identical, too anonymous—you hit a gate. The message feels abrupt, but the aim is simple: keep real readers in and automated agents out.

What News Group Newspapers says

News Group Newspapers Limited, publisher of titles such as The Sun, states that it bans automated access, collection and text or data mining of its content. That includes use for AI, machine learning and large language models. The policy sits in its terms and conditions and applies whether the access is direct or through an intermediary service.

Publishers are tightening rules: automated scraping and AI training on their articles are prohibited without explicit, paid permission.

The company notes that genuine users can be caught by mistake. If you believe you were flagged in error, it directs you to customer support at [email protected]. For commercial licensing or crawling permission, it lists [email protected].

How sites decide you look like a bot

Most systems do not rely on a single flag. They weigh dozens of signals and assign a risk score in a split second. The final decision triggers a soft challenge, such as a simple check, or a hard block.

Sometimes one legitimate choice—tight tracking protection, a misconfigured VPN, or a tab preloader—can push you over the threshold. That is when a real person meets a robot check.

The new economics behind the checks

Bot traffic burns money. Advertisers pay for impressions never seen by anyone. Servers scale to answer empty page views. Journalists watch their work lifted and repackaged elsewhere. Some publishers estimate a fifth to a third of their inbound hits show bot-like traits during spikes, which explains the surge in verification prompts on major stories and live blogs.

Stricter gates also support legal strategy. If a publisher states and enforces a no-scraping policy, it can defend its archives and commercial licences. That stance now intersects with the AI rush. Models hungry for fresh text trawl the open web. Media groups respond with contracts, paywalls and technical shields.

Caught at the gate? What you can try

Readers can reduce false positives with small adjustments. None of these suggestions require lowering your privacy standards; they target the signals that look robotic.

• Switch off any aggressive “preload pages” feature that fetches dozens of links at once.
• Allow first-party cookies for the site so your session persists like a normal visit.
• If using a VPN, try a residential or country-appropriate exit or pause it briefly.
• Update your browser; headless or outdated builds can appear synthetic.
• Avoid opening ten tabs of the same site in one instant. Pace your clicks.
• Disable automation helpers that simulate scrolling or auto-clicking.

Legitimate users mislabelled as bots can contact [email protected] for assistance; commercial users should email [email protected] for licences or whitelisting.

What this means for AI and data mining

For AI firms and data brokers, the message is blunt: do not harvest publisher content without permission. Training on news articles has value because the writing is reported, curated and edited. That value is exactly why licences now sit at the centre of negotiations. Vendors that ignore bans risk litigation and reputational damage.

Even academic or nonprofit projects face limits. Terms usually draw no distinction between for-profit and research crawling. The route forward involves paid datasets, syndication deals, or narrowly scoped API access with rate limits.

The grey area: when a human looks like a bot

Your setup can resemble automation without any bad intent. Privacy extensions strip identifiers. Corporate security routes traffic through data centres. Accessibility tools generate steady, machine-like inputs. The result can be a false flag.

Transparency helps. Clear error pages that explain the policy, show the reason in plain language, and give a contact channel reduce frustration. The boilerplate on these pages often mirrors the wording seen today across British publishers: no automated access, no scraping, no text or data mining, even for AI training, unless a licence says otherwise.

A quick test you can run at home

You can simulate a cleaner profile. Open a fresh browser profile with default settings. Disable your VPN for five minutes. Visit the site and read at a natural pace. If the gate vanishes, the cause lies with your add-ons or network hop. Add each tool back in, one by one, until the challenge returns. That pinpointing reduces guesswork and emails.

Risks and trade-offs for readers

CAPTCHA fatigue can push people away from trustworthy reporting to low-quality mirrors. That shift hurts both revenue and public debate. On the other hand, letting automated tools roam free would flood pages with junk traffic and copycat sites. The balance sits in smart gating that adapts to the moment: heavy during breaking news spikes, lighter for logged-in regulars.

For businesses that want lawful access

If your company needs to ingest headlines or analyse coverage, do not rely on scraping. Ask for a licence and technical access that fits your use case. News Group Newspapers directs such requests to [email protected]. A formal route gives reliability, speed and legal certainty that scraping cannot match.

Jargon buster and useful context

Fingerprinting refers to the way a site matches device traits—fonts, screen size, time zone—to recognise repeat visits even without cookies. Rate limiting caps the number of requests in a time window. Headless mode runs a browser without a visible window and often triggers alarms. Each technique plays a part in the decision to show a gate.

If you run a small site, similar principles apply at a lighter scale. Start with basic rate limits, challenge high-risk IP ranges, and label your terms clearly. Measure the challenge rate by hour and adjust thresholds so regulars glide through while scrapers stall. That data-driven tuning keeps pages fast and keeps readers on side.