While you focus on growing your brand and engaging your customers, an invisible ecosystem of automated "creepy crawlies" is likely consuming your server resources, harvesting your data, and potentially undermining your competitive advantage. These bots—comprising crawlers that scan the web to build massive datasets and fetchers that respond to real-time AI queries—now represent a staggering 37% of all observed internet activity.
Understanding the scale, risks, and management strategies for these AI-driven entities is no longer optional; it is a fundamental requirement for maintaining the performance, security, and integrity of any modern digital presence.
The Scale of the Invasion: Who is Crawling You?
The volume of automated traffic is immense. Leading the pack are the giants of the AI industry. Between April and July 2025, crawlers from Meta, Google, and OpenAI accounted for 95% of all AI crawler request volume. Meta alone dominated the landscape, responsible for 52% of total web bot traffic.
Beyond these corporate giants, the Common Crawl Foundation, a non-profit established in 2007, maintains a massive open repository containing over 300 billion pages. This corpus grows by 3 to 5 billion new pages every month, providing the raw material for research, semantic analysis, and the training of Large Language Models (LLMs) like DeepSeekMath. While these organizations often cite noble goals like democratizing access to information, the methods used to "wholesale" extract data from the open web—defined as anything not behind a login or paywall—can have significant consequences for site owners.
The Risks: Why These Crawlies Are a Threat
The impact of these bots goes far beyond simple data collection. They present real risks to your infrastructure and your business model:
-
Infrastructure Strain and "Accidental" DDoS: While crawlers like Common Crawl’s CCBot tend to follow a predictable schedule, other bots, particularly "fetcher bots" used by AI apps like ChatGPT and Perplexity, can drive massive real-time request volumes. In some cases, these bots exceed 39,000 requests per minute, placing overwhelming pressure on origin infrastructure and mimicking the effects of a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.
-
The "Traffic Apocalypse": AI chatbots often scrape information from publishers to share it directly with readers, effectively taking clicks and visitors away from the original source. This phenomenon threatens the financial viability of many digital businesses.
-
Security and Impersonation: Not all crawlers are honest. Many malicious bots falsely identify themselves as legitimate crawlers, such as CCBot, to bypass security filters. Without clear verification standards, these bots become a "blind spot" for digital teams.
-
Privacy and Personal Data Exposure: Bots don't just take your content; they collect Usage Data, including IP addresses, browser versions, and unique device identifiers. Furthermore, if names, email addresses, or phone numbers are freely available on your site, they are ingested into open repositories that can be freely downloaded by anyone in the world.
-
Loss of Control: Once your content is scraped into an archive, it becomes nearly impossible to remove. Some repositories use an "immutable" file format, meaning content cannot be deleted once added. Even when organizations claim to comply with takedown requests, the process is often criticized as being incredibly slow or incomplete.
Taking Back Control: The Advantages of Blocking
Proactively managing these "creepy crawlies" is essential for protecting your site’s metrics and your business’s intellectual property. The benefits of doing so are clear:
- Preserved Server Performance: Your site remains fast, reliable, and accessible to the people who matter most—your actual customers.
- Enhanced Security: Stronger safeguards reduce the risk of malicious actors slipping through and ensure greater trust in your digital environment.
- Data Sovereignty: You maintain control over how your content and usage data are accessed, keeping ownership firmly in your hands.
- Protection of Intellectual Property: Your unique content stays yours, safeguarded from being repurposed or exploited without your consent.
Active Oversight: Keeping Your Site Strong and Secure
Protecting your website from automated threats isn’t a one-off project—it’s an ongoing discipline. Just as your business evolves, so too do the bots that target it.
Ultimately, safeguarding your digital presence is about more than just technology—it’s about stewardship. Websites thrive when someone is actively watching over them, adapting defenses, and ensuring that your content serves your customers rather than being siphoned off by unseen bots
Having a dedicated person or team in place to manage this responsibility can make the difference between a site that quietly erodes under pressure and one that remains strong, secure, and aligned with your business goals.
Conclusion: Turning Awareness into Action
The rise of automated crawlers and fetchers is reshaping the digital landscape, consuming resources, siphoning traffic, and eroding the value of original content. What may seem like invisible background noise is, in reality, a direct challenge to the sustainability of modern online businesses.
Recognizing the scale of this activity is only the first step. The real differentiator lies in how organizations respond—whether they allow bots to quietly drain performance and competitive edge, or whether they take ownership of their digital presence. Safeguarding a website is no longer just a technical exercise; it is a strategic responsibility that demands vigilance, adaptability, and human oversight.