ShieldFont: a free web font designed to confuse AI scrapers
Playtype and Brazilian studio Seneda & Abrucio have released an open-source font that shows readers normal text while swapping words in the source that scrapers collect.
Copenhagen type foundry Playtype and the Brazilian studio Seneda & Abrucio have released ShieldFont, a free and open-source web font meant to make large-scale AI scraping of written content harder. Its letterforms are based on Playtype’s Optik and it comes in six weights.
How it works
According to Creative Bloq, people reading the page see normal text, while the font uses OpenType glyph substitution so that selected words in the underlying HTML are different from what is displayed. The substitutions keep sentences grammatical, which makes the altered text more likely to pass the quality filters used when collecting training data.
What the tests show
The current version targets common English nouns. In the creators’ own controlled tests, 55.8% of protected passages no longer made the same factual claim as the original once scraped.
Not a perfect shield
The project includes an online encoder, a React component on GitHub, CSS and CDN setup and a builder for applying the system to other fonts. The creators say it is “not unbreakable”: a scraper focused on one site could reverse the mapping, but the aim is to make mass scraping slower and more expensive.
Sources (1)
- Creative Bloq Type designers have created a free font that ‘poisons’ AI ↗ · 30 July 2026https://www.creativebloq.com/design/fonts-typography/type-designers-have-created-a-free-font-that-poisons-ai
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