How to protect your funeral home's obituaries from scraping
Honest framing first: you cannot make public obituaries unscrapable — families must be able to read them, so scrapers can too. What you can do is make wholesale copying slower, detection fast, and takedowns routine. That combination is what changes an aggregator's economics.
What helps
- A clear copyright line on every obituary page — "© [year] [home name] and the family. Republication requires written permission." It stops nobody, but it removes every "we assumed it was public" argument later and strengthens notices.
- Your service agreement should say it — one sentence granting the home a license to publish the obituary and photograph online and to act against unauthorized republication. This is what makes your takedown notices clean.
- Watermark-free but sized-down photos — publish display-resolution images, not print-resolution originals. Copies then always look worse than yours.
- Ask your website vendor what they already offer — some funeral-home platforms can require a click-through or delay RSS exposure of full text. Small friction, but it filters the laziest scrapers.
- Fast detection + consistent takedowns — the step that actually works. Aggregators optimize for volume; a home that reliably files DMCA, host, and Google-deindex requests within days of each republication becomes unprofitable to copy. That is the entire theory of Obituary Watch: new obituaries are the theft targets, so every new publication is monitored from day one.
What does nothing
Right-click blockers, "no copy" JavaScript, and hiding obituaries behind scroll-tricks — scrapers read the HTML, not the browser gestures, and families with accessibility needs get hurt by these more than any bot does.
Common questions
Q: Should we stop publishing obituaries on our own site and only use social media?
A: No — you would trade a solvable problem for a worse one. Your own site is the authoritative home families link to, and social platforms are scraped just as heavily with fewer remedies available to you.
Q: Does robots.txt stop obituary scrapers?
A: It stops polite crawlers that honor it. The aggregators that republish wholesale generally do not. Keep robots.txt configured for what you actually want indexed, but treat it as etiquette, not protection.
Q: How fast does detection need to be to matter?
A: Within days. Republished copies collect their search ranking early; a takedown filed in the first week usually lands before the copy outranks you. Daily monitoring of your newest obituaries is the practical answer.
See where your obituaries are republished right now. The free scan checks known republication domains in minutes — no account, private report. Continuous monitoring: Obituary Watch from $29/month.
Related answers
- How to remove an obituary from an aggregator site
- How to report a fake funeral stream page
- Third-party sites are selling flowers on our obituaries
Obituary Watch provides monitoring assistance, not legal advice, and is not affiliated with any funeral home, streaming provider, or platform. Findings are similarity signals that require human confirmation — they are not accusations about any website or company.