What Are AI Web Crawlers, and Why Are Businesses Blocking Them? [Video]

Enterprises are increasingly blocking artificial intelligence (AI) web crawlers that scrape data from websites and disrupt their performance, industry experts reveal. These bots, designed to collect data for training AI models, have raised concerns about ethical practices, website functionality, and intellectual property (IP) rights.

AI crawlers like GPTBot, Bytespider, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot are widely used to train large language models. Unlike conventional search engine bots such as GoogleBot and BingBot, which follow ethical scraping rules, many AI bots ignore content guidelines. Their activities overload servers, increase costs, and create security risks for websites.

A recent analysis by Cloudflare shows nearly 40% of the top internet domains have moved to block AI crawlers. Content delivery network companies report that bots from major players like TikTok (Bytespider) and OpenAI (GPTBot) dominate internet scraping activities. While some bots adhere to rules, most website owners are still choosing to block them, citing performance degradation …