A New Font Lets Websites Show Humans Readable Pages While Feeding Nonsense to AI Scrapers

Designers Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio have created ShieldFont, a typeface designed to give websites a practical opt-out from unauthorized AI scraping. ShieldFont uses ligatures to replace words in the on-screen rendering while leaving an altered, nonsensical version in the underlying HTML that scrapers read.

Human visitors see a perfectly readable page, but AI crawlers that download plaintext source code collect corrupted data. The designers say the goal is to disrupt unauthorized AI training without affecting the user experience.