Keeping the Web Up Under the Weight of AI Crawlers

Site operators have reported a sharp rise in automated bot traffic over recent months, which they mostly attribute to AI companies gathering training data from the open web. The article says scrapers can be useful, but when they are deployed carelessly they can raise hosting costs, lower performance, and cause outages. It recommends that scrapers follow robots.txt instructions, send a labeled User Agent string with operator, purpose and contact details, and offer a way for site operators to request back-offs or report problems. Suggested mitigations for operators include caching layers, static content, and targeted rate limiting, while noting that scraping itself is not the problem.