September 4, 2026
Scrapers Already Live in Your IPv6 Prefix
Teams still talk about IPv6 like a migration slide. Scanners talk about it like a clean neighborhood with no NAT bouncer. AI crawlers, research probes, and opportunists prefer addresses that answer on AAAA and sit behind firewalls written for 2005. If you published v6 because a vendor checkbox said so, you opened a side door and labeled it “future.”
Look up the prefix you actually announce
Find your public IPv6 address and run it through IP Lookup. You want your ISP or your own ASN, a prefix length you recognize, and a ROA that allows that length. “Not found” on RPKI is common on residential space. “Invalid” is a ticket. A hosting ASN on a home router means a tunnel ate your dual-stack.
Why AI traffic shows up here first
Crawlers dual-stack. Many prefer v6 when both records exist because the path is less crowded and the address is unique per host. That uniqueness is good for operators and convenient for people building hit lists. Unique is not private. Unique is addressable.
If your marketing site has AAAA and your origin allows WAN management on v6, you will meet the internet’s curiosity in logs that your v4 dashboard never shows. Turn those logs on. A “quiet” week on v4 is not a quiet week.
Home and office controls that actually match the protocol
- Stateful inbound deny on v6, including guest Wi-Fi prefixes.
- No WAN admin, no WPS leftovers, no UPnP-shaped holes.
- Probe v6 with ping and traceroute the same day you probe v4.
- Looking glass on the v6 prefix when a region “cannot see us” — dual-stack outages are often one family.
Do not disable v6 to hide. Disable inbound reachability you did not mean to publish. The rest of the internet already speaks this language.
Look up your IPv6 address and the AAAA of your website. If the origins surprise you, the side door is already in use.
FAQ
Privacy extensions hide me, right?
They rotate interface IDs. They do not hide the prefix. The prefix is still yours and still scanned.
Our ISP does not support v6. Are we safe?
You are off this particular hallway. Laptops will still grow v6 on other networks. Dual-stack hygiene travels with the device.