A high level analysis of tarpit performance in 2026. This post looks at my stats for my longstanding SSH tarpits but also at my much more recent AI Crawler maze.

Conclusion

Over time, SSH Tarpits have continued to be less effective per-connection. The rates at which they see connections has increased, but bots increasingly enforce client-side timeouts and don’t remain stuck for very long.

Until mid-last month, my LLM maze was serving a pretty significant number of requests each day. About 0.1% of requests came with a crawler willing and able to execute javascript: a tiny minority but still a fun one to play with.

I haven’t been collecting stats for long enough to say for sure, but it seems reasonable to speculate that the trail-off in maze requests is probably a sign of one (or more) AI companies finishing their training run and preparing to release new models.

It’ll be interesting to see whether activity picks back up over the next few months.