In order to ease with the setup of searxng-docker, it was decided to change the bot protection to off by default.

If you need to use the bot protection, and you are running searxng-docker, then turn limiter to true and link_token=true. The bot protection is useful when you are sharing your SearXNG instance to many users, and it is publicly known on the internet.

This doesn't affect public instances owners on the list https://searx.space/