Fair point. Direct outreach works when you can identify who to contact and they’re responsive. In practice though, most data teams are scraping hundreds of domains, not one. The hostmaster path doesn’t scale, and tarpits often get deployed at the CDN/WAF layer (Cloudflare, Vercel) where there’s no meaningful human on the other end anyway.

Curious to know have you had success with that approach at scale, or more for one-off access agreements?