AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

Cloud services giant Fastly has released a report claiming AI crawlers are putting a heavy load on the open web, slurping up sites at a rate that accounts for 80 percent of all AI bot traffic, with the remaining 20 percent used by AI fetchers. Bots and fetchers can hit websites hard, demanding data from a single site in thousands of requests per minute.

I can only see one thing causing this to stop: the AI bubble popping

According to the report [PDF], Facebook owner Meta's AI division accounts for more than half of those crawlers, while OpenAI accounts for the overwhelming majority of on-demand fetch requests.

"AI bots are reshaping how the internet is accessed and experienced, introducing new complexities for digital platforms," Fastly senior security researcher Arun Kumar opined in a statement on the report's release. "Whether scraping for training data or delivering real-time responses, these ...