AI: crawlers hungry for data that overload your servers and leave your sites slow or inaccessible
- 2025-11-01 19:42In the breakneck race to hoover up data, AI models are unleashing armies of bots that crawl the web nonstop—often ignoring rules like robots.txt. The result? Siphoned bandwidth, strained servers, and pages that slow to a crawl or go offline—an abnormal, excessive load that hurts publishers, businesses, and users alike. As The Register notes, more and more voices are calling out bots that send no traffic back yet rack up infrastructure costs and leave teams overwhelmed.
At OpenSource Solutions, we take a clear, measurable approach. We continuously analyze traffic logs to spot overconsumption, correlate signals across multiple servers to tell trustworthy crawlers (search engines) from aggressive AI scrapers, and roll out proactive defenses—quotas, rate limiting, IP allowlists, bot traps, even GeoIP filtering—to protect performance without blocking the indexing that’s essential for SEO. Let’s break it down.