AI Crawlers Destroying Websites in Hunger for Content

upstart writes:

But the cure may ruin the web....:

Opinion: With AI's rise, AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model (LLM) mills. How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. Leading the way and growing fast? AI bots.

Cloud services company Fastly agrees. It reports that 80% of all AI bot traffic comes from AI data fetcher bots. So, you ask, "What's the problem? Haven't web crawlers been around since 1993 with the arrival of the World Wide Web Wanderer in 1993?" Well, yes, they have. Anyone who runs a website, though, knows there's a huge, honking difference between the old-style crawlers and today's AI crawlers. The new ones are site killers.

Fastly warns that they're causing "performance degradation, service disruption, and increased operational costs." Why? Because they're hammering websites with traffic spikes that can reach up to ten or even twenty times normal levels within minutes.

Moreover, AI crawlers are much more aggressive than standard crawlers. As the InMotionhosting web hosting company notes, they also tend todisregard crawl delays or bandwidth-saving guidelines and extract full page text, and sometimes attempt to follow dynamic links or scripts.

The result? If you're using a shared server for your website, as many small businesses do, even if your site isn't being shaken down for content, other sites on the same hardware with the same Internet pipe may be getting hit. This means your site's performance drops through the floor even if an AI crawler isn't raiding your website.

[...] Yes, of course, we can try to fend them off with logins, paywalls, CAPTCHA challenges, and sophisticated anti-bot technologies. You know one thing AI is good at? It's getting around those walls.

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