The onslaught of AI-enabled tools and LLM-based applications has given rise to a new generation of bots – intelligent, persistent, and sometimes transparent to legacy traffic filters. While some of these AI crawlers and web bots are created by reputable organizations for legitimate purposes, the unmonitored proliferation of automated scraping agents is causing havoc on websites all over the world.
From misleading metrics and bandwidth overload to data theft and misuse of APIs, AI wielding bots are causing perilous distress to digital business operations.
In this article, we’ll examine the ways that the emergence of AI crawlers is affecting web infrastructure and what it means for SEO and analytics, as well as what IT and security teams can do to take control back.
What Are AI Crawlers and Bots?
AI-level chatbots, AI scrapers, or (just) AI crawlers are programs that are essentially automated scripts that gather data from, say, websites to train the big LLM engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and so on).
Unlike the bots used for classic search engines (Googlebot), these bots are specifically dedicated to not only date indexing content to be released for searching purposes, but to aggregate huge text data – sometimes without the website owner even being aware of it.
Some of the more well-known are as follows:
- GPTBot – Used by OpenAI to crawl publicly available web content
- CCBot – Used by Common Crawl, a non-profit open web crawler used in many AI training datasets
- ClaudeBot – Associated with Anthropic’s Claude LLM
- Google-Extended – Enables or prevents data usage for AI model training
- Bytespider – By ByteDance (TikTok) for AI training purposes
While most of these bots account for robots.txt requests, many more do not – at least, not the unnamed or stealth bots of less transparent artificially intelligent companies or data scrapers.
Why AI Crawlers Are Causing Havoc
1. Inflated Website Traffic & Skewed Analytics
A high volume of traffic is generated from AI bots that in many cases substantially distorts all the metrics like the following:
- Pageviews
- Bounce rates
- Time on site
- Conversion rates
This manufactured traffic undermines data-driven decision making, particularly in marketing, UX and product strategy.
According to a report by Imperva, more than 47% of all internet traffic in 2023 was created by bots – a significant rise attributed mainly to the impact of AI-related bots.
2. Content Scraping & IP Theft
It is not only that AI crawlers are browsing for content – they are also stealing and copying whole content libraries. From documentation and blog posts to FAQs and product descriptions, your hard-earned IP could be getting consumed by an LLM training set without your permission, pay or credit.
This creates multiple risks:
- Content repurposed elsewhere without credit
- Reduced SEO performance from duplicate content
- Legal grey areas over content ownership and fair use
The New York Times, Reddit, and Stack Overflow, among others, have reacted to the unwanted practice by fighting license agreements or lawsuits with AI companies for illegal data scraping.
3. Bandwidth & Infrastructure Strain
AI bots are often hostile in their actions and have no throttling mechanism. Unlike traditional search engine bots which ask for content ten times or less in a row, they crawl quickly and deeply, and often.
This causes: If you have a small website or if you think the server resources are limited for the bigger sites or offices to be installed.
- Bandwidth overages
- Slower page loads
- Increased hosting costs
- Outages due to excessive requests
For instance, an AI crawler can be configured to 1000 URLs and URL crawling can overwhelm a website by increasing the volume of URLs per minute that a website or any system can process through caching layer, API or Back-end system.
4. API Abuse & Shadow Data Mining
Straightly after having the capacity to scrape website pages, radiant information robots, in a capacity that goes past these services, also acknowledge Web API to process structure information including items, costs, help substance facts, and so on. Even if you have rate-limited your APIs, some AI bots change IPs or use proxies to bypass restrictions.
Left unmonitored, this leads to:
- Data leakage
- Unauthorized model training
- Competitive intelligence gathering
Worse still, your public facing API traffic may be 95% bots, it costs real money using your cloud environment fees and reduces your performance for real users.
5. SEO Manipulation & Ranking Issues
Too many bots can create noise in the organic traffic signals and trigger penalties to the website from the search engines. If you have a large volume of website visitors composed of AI bots, it is possible for Google Analytics and Search Console to show:
- Unusually high bounce rates
- Unexplainable ranking drops
- Declining user engagement metrics
All of which can influence Google and Bing ranking of your site – with real SEO results driven by fake traffic.
How to Detect AI Bot Traffic
Here’s how you can identify whether AI crawlers are hitting your site:
Check Web Server Logs
Look for suspicious or unknown user-agents such as:
- GPTBot
- CCBot
- ClaudeBot
- Bytespider
- ai-crawler
- python-requests or http.client (often used by custom scrapers)
Monitor Traffic Spikes
If you suddenly see an increase in pageviews, but no increase in conversions, it can be bot traffic.
Analyze with Cloudflare, AWS, or Similar
Use tools like:
- Cloudflare Bot Management
- AWS WAF with Bot Control
- Datadog or New Relic for traffic pattern anomalies
Use Bot Management Tools
For more active control:
- Enable Cloudflare Bot Management or similar
- Use CDN rules to block or challenge unknown user agents
- Implement rate-limiting and IP throttling
- Detect and block traffic based on behavioral fingerprints, not just user-agent strings
Protect APIs & Structured Data
- Require authentication even for “public” APIs
- Set low-rate limits
- Use CAPTCHAs or token gating
- Obfuscate high-value fields in front-end code
Consider Legal or Licensing Actions
If you’re a content publisher or SaaS provider, consider:
- Updating your Terms of Service to prohibit automated scraping
- Using copyright notices and legal headers in HTML
- Joining efforts like the Content Authenticity Initiative (led by Adobe and others)
- Exploring licensing partnerships (as Reddit, Stack Overflow, and Shutterstock have done)
What Google and Microsoft Say About AI Crawlers
- Google’s AI crawler was rebranded into the name “Google-Extended”. You can block it using:
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /
- While the results and definitions suggested intelligent crawlers responsible for the bot traffic displaying unknown user-agents, this info hasn’t been officially revealed by Microsoft so far, but it would be logical that Copilot is causing AI crawlers. Always keep an eye on the severing logs for anything that is not the same as typical.
Using Google bots can be found on their official documentation.
Final Thoughts: Time to Audit Your Bot Traffic
The growth of AI crawlers is undeniably not slowing down, if anything, it is speeding up because the generative AI tools crave more content for them to learn from.
While some traffic generated by AI is helpful or harmless, nowadays most websites are getting subjected to AI fraud that overshadows the benefits:
- Skewed analytics
- Increased costs
- Stolen IP
- Reduced SEO performance
Whether you run a Content rich website, an e-commerce store, or a SaaS provider, it’s high time to audit and secure your digital assets against unauthorized AI scraping.