AI scrapers are suffocating servers, driving clients away, and melting CPUs... are you seeing this too?
Holy crap guys, Kinsta just dropped some infrastructure data after digging through over 10 billion HTTP requests and the numbers on AI scrapers are straight up terrifying. We used to deal with basic brute-force attacks or cool search crawlers that actually respected your server, but these new AI bots are an absolute nightmare.
Get this, a single AI scraping bot hit their network 3.75 million times in just 24 hours. That is literally one request every 23 milliseconds. That exact same bot racked up over 550 million hits in a single month before they managed to block it at the edge. They saw AI crawler activity jump by more than 300 percent overall, and the worst part is that about 80 percent of this traffic is just scraping data to train models. They arent sending you any search traffic or actual visitors back, they are just sucking your server dry.
When a bot hits your setup with that kind of crazy frequency, it destroys your PHP workers, melts your CPU, and crashes your site for real users. You end up paying for bigger server plans just to host a bunch of greedy AI bots.
If you're sick of these relentless scrapers melting your server, we actually built a free WordPress plugin and an open-source app called Stop Bad Bots to help block this junk before it hits your origin; I dropped the links in my pinned post if you want to check them out.
Posted Sep 5, 2026, 3:54 PM UTC