Why not simply just not differentiate between humans and bots, and enforce a usage policy that works for your business?
You don't want them scraping 1000 articles an hour? Just put a limit on viewing 20 articles an hour, no need to differentiate between human and robot.
The boundary between humans and robots will blur over the next few centuries. At some point it will just be a spectrum from all-inorganic to mixed to all-organic beings that roam the planet. We might as well prepare for that future by abolishing chemistryism (discrimination against organic vs. inorganic chemistry of a being) today.
(Yes this sounds stupid, but 200 years ago, abolishing racism sounded stupid too.)
Limit by what? IP? Bots are distributed across IPs while certain users share IPs (NAT, universities, etc.). Cookie? Bots won't store cookies. Overall? Then human users will be blocked outright if there's enough bots.
You don't want them scraping 1000 articles an hour? Just put a limit on viewing 20 articles an hour, no need to differentiate between human and robot.
The boundary between humans and robots will blur over the next few centuries. At some point it will just be a spectrum from all-inorganic to mixed to all-organic beings that roam the planet. We might as well prepare for that future by abolishing chemistryism (discrimination against organic vs. inorganic chemistry of a being) today.
(Yes this sounds stupid, but 200 years ago, abolishing racism sounded stupid too.)