Beyond Human Traffic: Why Monitoring Bots and AI Crawlers is Crucial

Understanding the impact of automated visitors on your website's performance and security.

In the bustling world of the internet, not all visitors are human. A significant portion of your website's traffic comes from automated programs known as bots. While some are benign, like search engine crawlers, others can be malicious. With the rise of artificial intelligence, it's more important than ever to understand the difference and actively monitor all bot activity on your site.

Missing bot traffic, especially from advanced AI crawlers, can make you or your business disappear in AI conversations. For example if you are building a product and OpenAI doesn't know about your business then it won't suggest your product when it's asked for product recommendations. In tomorrow's world this might be synonymous to the death of your business.

The Dual Nature of Bots: Good vs. Bad

Bots come in two main flavors: good and bad.

Good Bots

These are essential for the web's ecosystem. The most prominent examples are search engine crawlers (like Googlebot, Bingbot, etc.) that index your content so your pages appear in search results. AI bots are also becoming more sophisticated, analyzing content for context, quality, and user intent.

Bad Bots

These are a nuisance and a threat. They can be used for spamming, scraping your content, credential stuffing, and even Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. Monitoring bot activity allows you to identify and block these bad actors, protecting your website and its resources.

Why Monitoring AI Crawlers is a New Imperative

The new wave of AI bots, distinct from traditional search engine crawlers, presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities. These bots, often from companies developing large language models (LLMs) and other AI services, are trained by ingesting vast amounts of data from the web.

  • Resource Consumption: AI crawlers can be aggressive, making a large number of requests in a short period. This can consume significant server resources, slow down your website for human visitors, and increase your hosting costs.
  • Content Usage and Copyright: Understanding which AI bots are crawling your site helps you protect your intellectual property. You can use your robots.txt file to control their access or even block them entirely, giving you a say in how your content is used to train AI models. But then you risk being ignored by AI models completely, you won't exist for them.
  • SEO and Analytics Accuracy: Unmonitored bot traffic can pollute your analytics data, making it difficult to accurately measure human visitor behavior. By segmenting bot traffic, you can get a clearer picture of your actual audience.