AI Scrapers Are Overloading Servers- How We’re Blocking Aggressive Bots

Amazon, SEO tools, and AI training models are hammering sites, slowing things down, and eating up server resources. There’s been a huge surge in bot activity across our client websites in 2025. If your site has been running slower than usual or, worse, experiencing outages, you might have some unwelcome guests: Amazonbot, Googlebot, Bingbot, AhrefsBot, SemrushBot, and their data-hungry friends. These bots are scraping content, hammering servers, and in some cases, outright ignoring the polite ‘please stay away’ requests in robots.txt.

Why Is This Happening?

• Search engines and data companies are ramping up their web crawling efforts for a few reasons:
• AI-driven crawlers are increasing as companies train machine learning models on massive datasets.
• Amazonbot is aggressively scraping product data—likely for price comparisons and AI-driven recommendations.
• Googlebot and Bingbot are crawling deeper and more frequently—possibly due to algorithm changes prioritizing fresher content.
• SEO and marketing bots like AhrefsBot and SemrushBot are harvesting data for search ranking and competitive analysis.
• For e-commerce sites, blogs with frequent posts, or any content-heavy website, this means more server strain, slower load times, and even downtime if left unchecked.

How We Combat Aggressive Bots

At MIcreative, every site we manage runs through Cloudflare, which gives us a front-row seat to bot traffic patterns. When we notice traffic spikes that aren’t from real users, we take action. Here’s our strategy:

1. Use Cloudflare’s Firewall & Bot Management Tools – We create custom firewall rules to block aggressive bots while allowing essential crawlers like Googlebot to operate at a reasonable frequency.
2. Implement Rate Limiting – By capping how frequently bots can access a site, we prevent them from overloading servers and taking resources from real visitors.
3. Enable Bot Fight Mode – Cloudflare’s built-in bot protection helps us block known malicious bots without interfering with legitimate traffic.
4. Adjust Super Bot Fight Mode (For Pro & Business Plans) – This feature adds an extra layer of protection, automatically challenging or blocking automated traffic based on behavior.
5. Proprietary Plugin Stack – Clients on our maintenance plans get access to carefully curated plugins that optimize performance and security.
6. Ongoing Monitoring & Adjustments – Since bots evolve, so do our strategies. We continuously analyze traffic and fine-tune our defenses.

What This Means for Your Site

With these strategies in place, your website will be:
✅ Faster – Less bot traffic means better load times for real visitors.
✅ More Secure – Prevent scrapers from stealing content and data.
✅ More Reliable – Fewer crashes and resource hogging from unnecessary bot traffic.

If you’re noticing slower performance, higher hosting costs, or strange traffic spikes, bots could be the culprit. We’re already proactively managing this for our clients, but if you need help setting up protections for your site, let’s talk.

Have you noticed an increase in bot traffic? Are certain bots hitting your site harder than others? Want a bot-free website? Let’s discuss!