AI Bots Gone Wild: How Crawlers Are Overloading the Web and Threatening Content Creators
AI crawlers are slurping up sites, with Meta leading the charge, accounting for over half of this digital buffet. Fastly warns that bots are reshaping the web’s landscape, creating challenges for visibility, control, and cost. It’s a bot-eat-web world, and unless the AI bubble pops, this traffic jam might just keep growing.
Hot Take:
AI crawlers are like teenagers at a buffet—constantly hungry, indiscriminate, and definitely not concerned about the cost! Fastly’s report is like the restaurant manager saying, “Enough already, save some bandwidth for the rest of us!”
Key Points:
- AI crawlers account for 80% of AI bot traffic, with Meta leading the pack.
- OpenAI dominates the AI fetcher scene, responsible for 98% of requests.
- Websites are facing increased load, not from humans, but from bots.
- Ignoring robots.txt is bad form; Anubis and tarpit Nepenthes are the new bouncers for bots.
- Regulation might be the only way to curb the AI bot buffet.
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