If you’re running a well-behaved crawler (for example one that respects nofollow, and doesn’t try every single product filter combination it can find) then fine. If you don’t, then I don’t have any sympathy for the consequences that your niche of the industry caused.
Not everyone has the budget for unlimited bandwidth and compute, and in several of my clients’ cases that’s been >95% of all traffic.
People running these bots with AI/VC capital are just script kiddies that forgot that not every site is a boatload of app servers behind Cloudflare.
My service only extracts public data major retailers, not indie sites, and deducts more credits for lower-traffic domains to offset load differences.
It would be great if there were reliable ways to distinguish good bots from bad ones — many actually improve discoverability and sales. I see this with affiliate shopping sites that depend on e-commerce data, though that impact is hard to trace directly.
The bad actors are the ones cloning sites or using data for manipulation and propaganda.
Not everyone has the budget for unlimited bandwidth and compute, and in several of my clients’ cases that’s been >95% of all traffic.
People running these bots with AI/VC capital are just script kiddies that forgot that not every site is a boatload of app servers behind Cloudflare.