AI web crawlers have proliferated and now drive a significant share of web traffic, with bots accounting for about 30% globally and AI data fetcher bots comprising 80% of AI bot traffic. AI crawlers operate far more aggressively than traditional crawlers, often disregarding crawl delays and bandwidth guidelines, extracting full page text, and attempting to follow dynamic links or scripts. These behaviors produce sudden traffic spikes—sometimes ten to twenty times normal levels within minutes—that cause performance degradation, service disruption, and higher operational costs. Shared hosting environments and smaller sites are especially vulnerable and can be knocked offline by such activity.
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 to disregard crawl delays or bandwidth-saving guidelines and extract full page text, and sometimes attempt to follow dynamic links or scripts.
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