Source URL: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/08/31/1820249/are-ai-web-crawlers-destroying-websites-in-their-hunt-for-training-data
Source: Slashdot
Title: Are AI Web Crawlers ‘Destroying Websites’ In Their Hunt for Training Data?
Feedly Summary:
AI Summary and Description: Yes
Summary: The text discusses the adverse effects of AI web crawlers on website performance, highlighting the increasing web traffic attributed to these bots. It addresses the challenges website owners face in combatting aggressive AI crawlers and suggests potential solutions, including the introduction of an llms.txt file standard.
Detailed Description: The text draws attention to the rapidly growing impact of AI web crawlers on website performance, emphasizing their difference from traditional crawlers. It cites several key points relevant to security and infrastructure professionals:
– **AI Web Crawler Traffic**: AI crawlers, led by Meta, Google, and OpenAI, are contributing to a staggering amount of web traffic, with bots now accounting for 30% of global web traffic. This increase is alarming, as AI crawlers can generate traffic surges that are ten to twenty times higher than usual in mere minutes.
– **Performance Issues**:
– **Site Degradation**: Companies like Fastly observe that AI crawlers can lead to performance degradation, service disruption, and increased operational costs.
– **Shared Hosting Impact**: Many small businesses using shared servers may experience a decline in their site’s performance, not directly from AI crawlers targeting them, but from other sites on the same server being overwhelmed by bot traffic.
– **Behavior of AI Crawlers**:
– These crawlers are noted for being aggressive and often ignore traditional crawl delay settings and robots.txt files, making them particularly difficult to manage.
– They are capable of extracting full page text and interacting with dynamic content, which poses further challenges to website owners.
– **Proposed Solutions**:
– **llms.txt File**: There’s a suggestion to implement an llms.txt file standard to manage which content LLMs can access, although the reception and effectiveness of this proposal remain uncertain.
– **Bot-Blocking Services**: Infrastructure providers like Cloudflare are starting to offer default bot-blocking services aimed at preventing AI crawlers from accessing websites and alleviating performance issues.
– **Risks for Website Owners**: The article conveys a sense of urgency for website owners to adopt measures to protect their sites from the aggressive behaviors of AI crawlers. This includes potential strategies like implementing paywalls, CAPTCHAs, and advanced anti-bot technologies, though challenges in overcoming AI’s ability to circumvent these defenses persist.
This analysis serves as a critical reminder for infrastructure and security professionals to be aware of the evolving landscape of web traffic, specifically regarding AI-driven challenges. Emphasizing proactive measures and staying informed about new standards could mitigate risks associated with these advanced crawlers.