Neocities founder stuck in chatbot hell after Bing blocked 1.5 million sites

One of the weirdest corners of the Internet is suddenly hard to find on Bing, after the search engine inexplicably started blocking approximately 1.5 million independent websites hosted on Neocities.

Founded in 2013 to archive the “aesthetic awesomeness” of GeoCities websites, Neocities keeps the spirit of the 1990s Internet alive. It lets users design free websites without relying on standardized templates devoid of personality. For hundreds of thousands of people building websites around art, niche fandoms, and special expertise—or simply seeking a place to get a little weird online—Neocities provides a blank canvas that can be endlessly personalized when compared to a Facebook page. Delighted visitors discovering these sites are more likely to navigate by hovering flashing pointers over a web of spinning GIFs than clicking a hamburger menu or infinitely scrolling.

That’s the style of Internet that Kyle Drake, Neocities’ founder, strives to maintain. So he was surprised when he noticed that Bing was curiously blocking Neocities sites last summer. At first, the issue seemed resolved by contacting Microsoft, but after receiving more recent reports that users were struggling to log in, Drake discovered that another complete block was implemented in January. Even more concerning, he saw that after delisting the front page, Bing had started pointing users to a copycat site where he was alarmed to learn they were providing their login credentials.

Monitoring stats, Drake was stunned to see that Bing traffic had suddenly dropped from about half a million daily visitors to zero. He immediately reported the issue using Bing webmaster tools. Concerned that Bing was not just disrupting traffic but possibly also putting Neocities users at risk if bad actors were gaming search results, he hoped for a prompt resolution.

“This one site that was just a copy of our front page, I didn’t know if it was a phishing attack or what it was, I was just like, ‘whoa, what the heck?’” Drake told Ars.

However, weeks went by as Drake hit wall after wall, submitting nearly a dozen tickets while trying to get past the Bing chatbot to find a support member to fix the issue. Frustrated, he tried other internal channels as well, including offering to buy ads to see if an ads team member could help.

“I tried everything,” Drake said, but nothing worked. Neocities sites remained unlisted on Bing.

Although Bing only holds about 4.5 percent of the global search engine market, Drake said it was “embarrassing” that Neocities sites can’t be discovered using the default Windows search engine. He also noted that many other search engines license Bing data, further compounding the issue.

Ultimately, it’s affecting a lot of people, Drake said, but he suspects that his support tickets are being buried in probably trillions of requests each day from people wanting to improve their Bing indexing.

“There’s probably an actual human being at Bing that actually could fix this,” Drake told Ars, but “when you go to the webmaster tools,” you’re stuck talking to an AI chatbot, and “it’s all kind of automated.”

Ars reached Microsoft for comment, and the company took action to remove some inappropriate blocks.

Within 24 hours, the Neocities front page appeared in search results, but Drake ran tests over the next few days that showed that most subdomains are still being blocked, including popular Neocities sites that should garner high rankings.

Pressed to investigate further, Microsoft confirmed that some Neocities sites were delisted for violating policies designed to keep low-quality sites out of search results.

However, Microsoft would not identify which sites were problematic or directly connect with Neocities to resolve a seemingly significant amount of ongoing site blocks that do not appear to be linked to violations. Instead, Microsoft recommended that Neocities find a way to work directly with Microsoft, despite Ars confirming that Microsoft is currently ignoring an open ticket.

For Drake, “the current state of things is unknown.” It’s hard to tell if popular Neocities sites are still being blocked or if possibly Bing’s reindexing process is slow. Microsoft declined to clarify.

He’s still hoping that Microsoft will eventually resolve all the improper blocks, making it possible for Bing users to use the search engine not just to find businesses or information but also to discover creative people making websites just for fun. With so much AI slop invading social networks and search engines, Drake sees Neocities as “one of the last bastions of human content.”

“I hope we can resolve this amicably for both of us and that this doesn’t happen again in the future,” Drake said. “It’s really important for the future of the small web, and for quality content for web surfers in an increasingly generative AI world, that creative sites made by real humans are able to get a fair shot in search engine results.”

Bing deranked suspected phishing site

After Drake failed to quietly resolve the issue with Bing, he felt that he had no choice but to alert users to the potential risks from Bing’s delisting.

In a blog post in late January, Drake warned that Bing had “completely blocked” all Neocities subdomains from its search index. Even worse, “Bing was also placing what appeared to be a phishing attack against Neocities on the first page of search results,” Drake said.

“This is not only bad for search results, it’s very possible that it is actively dangerous,” Drake said.

After “several” complaints, Bing eventually deranked the suspected phishing site, Drake confirmed. But Bing “declined to reverse the block or provide a clear, actionable explanation for it,” which leaves Neocities users vulnerable, he said.

Since “it’s easy to get higher pagerank than a blocked site,” Drake warned that “it is possibly only a matter of time before another concerning site appears on Bing searches for Neocities.”

The blog emphasized that Google, the platform’s biggest traffic driver, was not blocking Neocities, nor was any search engine unlinked to Bing data. Urging a boycott that may force a resolution, Drake wrote, “we are recommending that Neocities users, and the broader Internet in general, not use Bing or search engines that source their results from Bing until this issue is resolved.

“If you use Bing or Bing-powered search engines, Neocities sites will not appear in your search results, regardless of content quality, originality, or compliance with webmaster guidelines,” Drake said. “If any Neocities-like sites appear on these results, they may be active phishing attacks against Neocities and should be treated with caution.”

Bing still blocking popular Neocities sites

Drake doesn’t want to boycott Bing, but in his blog, he said that Microsoft left him no choice but public disclosure:

“We did not want to write this post. We try very hard to have a good relationship with search engine providers. We would much rather quietly resolve this issue with Bing staff and move on. But after months of attempting to engage constructively through multiple channels, it became clear that silence only harms our users. Especially those who don’t realize their sites are invisible on some search engines.”

Drake told Ars that he thinks most people don’t realize how big Neocities has gotten since its early days reviving GeoCities’ spunk. The platform hosts 1,459,700 websites that have drawn in 13 billion visitors. Over the years, it has been profiled in Wired and The New York Times, and more recently, it has become a popular hub for gaming communities, Polygon reported.

As Neocities grew, Drake told Ars that much of his focus has been on improving content moderation. He works closely with a full-time dedicated content moderation staffer to quickly take down any problematic sites within 24 hours, he said. That effort includes reviewing reports and proactively screening new sites, with Drake noting that “our name domain provider requires us to take them down within 48 hours.”

Microsoft prohibits things like scraping content that could be considered copyright infringement or automatically generating content using “garbage text” to game the rankings. It also monitors for malicious behavior like phishing, as well as for prompt injection attacks on Bing’s large language model.

It’s unclear what kind of violations Microsoft found ahead of instituting the complete block; however, Drake told Ars that he has yet to identify any content that may have triggered it. He said he would promptly remove any websites flagged by Microsoft, if he could only talk to someone who could share that information.

“Naturally, we still don’t catch 100 percent of the sites with proactive moderation, and occasionally some problematic sites do get missed,” Drake said.

Although Drake is curious to learn more about what triggered the blocks, he told Ars that it’s clear that non-violative sites are still invisible on Bing.

One of the longest-running and most popular Neocities sites, Wired Sound for Wired People, is a perfect example. The bizarre, somewhat creepy anime fanpage is “very popular” and “has a lot of links to it all over the web,” Drake said. Yet if you search for its subdomain, “fauux,” the site no longer appears in Bing search results, as of this writing, while Google reliably spits it out as the top result.

Drake said that he still believes that Bing is blocking content by mistake, but Bing’s automated support tools aren’t making it easy to defend creators who are randomly blocked by one of the world’s biggest search engines.

“We have one of the lowest ratios of crap to legitimate content, human-made content, on the Internet,” Drake said. “And it’s really frustrating to see that all these human beings making really cool sites that people want to go to are just not available on the default Windows search engine.”