Facets Protection
Excessive AI bot traffic has been hammering Drupal faceted search views. This module adds time-limited tokens to facet links, showing a brief blocking page to bots while letting real users through — a practical stopgap while sites migrate to Facets v3.
Facets Protection addresses a growing problem in the Drupal ecosystem: AI crawler bots traversing faceted search URLs at scale, causing server overload on sites that rely on the Facets module.
The module works by appending cryptographically signed tokens to every facet link. These tokens expire after a configurable time window. When a bot replays a cached faceted URL without a valid token, it receives a lightweight 410 Gone response — a blocking page that appears for 2.5 seconds before showing fresh, tokenised links. The blocking page is intentionally minimal to reduce server load, and can be themed via a template file.
This is explicitly a transitional solution. The Facets v3 release already handles this natively by integrating facets as exposed filters in Views. Facets Protection buys time for teams whose budget or schedule does not yet allow migration to v3, and pairs well with the separate Facet Bot Blocker module which takes a complementary approach by capping the number of selectable facets.
The module ships at version 1.0.0, supports Drupal 10.3 and 11, and is covered by the Drupal security advisory policy.
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