Introduction to AI Web Crawlers
Website operators across the web are reporting increased activity from AI web crawlers. This surge raises concerns about site performance, analytics, and server resources. These bots consume significant bandwidth to collect data for large language models, which could impact performance metrics relevant to search rankings.
How AI Crawlers Affect Site Performance
SEO professionals regularly optimize for traditional search engine crawlers, but the growing presence of AI crawlers from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Amazon presents new technical considerations. Several site operators have reported performance issues and increased server loads directly attributable to AI crawler activity. For instance, SourceHut has faced disruptions due to aggressive LLM crawlers and has blocked several cloud providers, including Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, for the high volumes of bot traffic originating from their networks.
Data from cloud hosting service Vercel shows the scale of this traffic: OpenAI’s GPTBot generated 569 million requests in a single month, while Anthropic’s Claude accounted for 370 million. These AI crawlers represented about 20 percent of Google’s search crawler volume during the same period. This significant traffic can lead to performance issues, increased server loads, and higher bandwidth costs.
The Potential Impact on Analytics Data
Significant bot traffic can affect analytics data. According to DoubleVerify, an ad metrics firm, "general invalid traffic – aka GIVT, bots that should not be counted as ad views – rose by 86 percent in the second half of 2024 due to AI crawlers." The firm noted that "a record 16 percent of GIVT from known-bot impressions in 2024 were generated by those that are associated with AI scrapers, such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and AppleBot." This influx of invalid traffic can lead to inaccurate analytics and skewed metrics.
Identifying AI Crawler Patterns
Understanding AI crawler behavior can help with traffic analysis. What makes AI crawlers different from traditional bots is their frequency and depth of access. While search engine crawlers typically follow predictable patterns, AI crawlers exhibit more aggressive behaviors. Dennis Schubert, who maintains infrastructure for the Diaspora social network, observed that AI crawlers "don’t just crawl a page once and then move on. Oh, no, they come back every 6 hours because lol why not." This repeated crawling multiplies the resource consumption, as the same pages are accessed repeatedly without a clear rationale.
Balancing Visibility with Resource Management
Website owners and SEO professionals face a practical consideration: managing resource-intensive crawlers while maintaining visibility for legitimate search engines. To determine if AI crawlers are significantly impacting your site, review server logs for unusual traffic patterns, look for spikes in bandwidth usage that don’t correspond with user activity, check for high traffic to resource-intensive pages like archives or API endpoints, and monitor for unusual patterns in your Core Web Vitals metrics.
Managing AI Crawler Traffic
Several options are available for those impacted by excessive AI crawler traffic. Google introduced a solution called Google-Extended in the robots.txt file, which allows websites to stop having their content used to train Google’s Gemini and Vertex AI services while still allowing those sites to show up in search results. Cloudflare recently announced "AI Labyrinth," which links unauthorized crawlers to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them.
Looking Ahead
As AI integrates into search and discovery, SEO professionals should manage crawlers carefully. Here are some practical next steps:
- Audit server logs to assess AI crawler impact on your specific sites.
- Consider implementing Google-Extended in robots.txt to maintain search visibility while limiting AI training access.
- Adjust analytics filters to separate bot traffic for more accurate reporting.
- For severely affected sites, investigate more advanced mitigation options.
Conclusion
The rise of AI web crawlers presents both opportunities and challenges for website owners and SEO professionals. While AI crawlers can drive innovation and improvement in search and discovery, they also pose significant risks to site performance, analytics, and server resources. By understanding AI crawler behavior, identifying patterns, and implementing effective management strategies, website owners can balance visibility with resource management and ensure a smooth user experience. Most websites will do fine with standard robots.txt files and monitoring, but high-traffic sites may benefit from more advanced solutions to mitigate the impact of AI crawlers.