Getting more visitors to your website usually sounds like good news. But when those visitors are bots making thousands of requests without buying anything, the extra attention can come at a cost.
A recent Search Engine Journal article highlighted the pressure AI crawlers are putting on websites. For marketing managers and business owners, it raises a fair question: how do you protect your website while keeping your business visible?
What are AI bots doing on your website?
Bots are automated tools that visit web pages, often called crawlers. Search engines use them to discover content, while AI companies use crawlers for purposes such as collecting data to train and improve AI models, as well as finding information to answer users’ questions.
The problems start when that activity becomes excessive. Some crawlers repeatedly request different versions of similar pages or get caught in loops, creating unnecessary work for the server that runs your website.
Hosting provider Kinsta recorded 3.75 million requests to add-to-cart URLs from a single AI crawler in 24 hours across its infrastructure. That’s one observed example, rather than a prediction for every website, but it shows how quickly automated activity can add up.
Why does AI bot traffic matter for your business?
Heavy crawling can put pressure on hosting resources, potentially increasing costs and slowing things down for real customers. Pages involving baskets, searches or filters can be particularly demanding because the server may need to process each request individually.
If you’ve invested in getting someone to your website, you want them to be able to browse, enquire or buy without a struggle. That makes bot activity relevant to your marketing performance, even if the technical work sits with your developer.
There can be SEO implications too. Google says it reduces crawling when a website slows down or returns server errors. If excessive bot activity causes those problems, it could delay Google discovering new pages or picking up updates.
How can you protect your website and its SEO?
Start by bringing your marketing, SEO and web teams into the same conversation. Three checks can help you work out what needs attention:
- Understand the activity: Ask your developer or hosting provider which bots are visiting and whether their requests are contributing to slowdowns.
- Review access carefully: Decide which crawlers need access to your site and where restrictions could reduce unnecessary load. For example, your technical SEO or web team can use your robots.txt file to block specific AI bot user agents from certain areas of the site, particularly pages such as basket and checkout functions.
- Measure business value: Alongside visibility, look at the enquiries, sales and engagement generated by visitors arriving through search and AI tools.
Those decisions need to account for how people find you. Google uses Googlebot for Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, so blocking it can affect your visibility across those experiences.
Google also confirms that existing SEO best practices remain relevant for its AI search features. Useful content, accessible pages, clear internal links and a good experience still deserve your attention.
To wrap it all up
Getting your business seen online takes work, so it’s frustrating to think your website could be working overtime for bots that bring little back to your business. The balance is keeping your content accessible to the crawlers that help people find you, while managing any activity that’s putting unnecessary pressure on your site.
You don’t need to know all the technical details yourself. A chat with your SEO team, developer or hosting provider is a good place to start. They can help you understand what’s happening and whether anything needs to change, so your website keeps working well for the people who matter: your customers.
And if you’re unsure where to start, we’re always happy to help. Get in touch with the Mabo team, and we can talk through what it means for your website and SEO.
September 23, 2026
