Expanded from Aditya's LinkedIn discussion about AI crawlers, content control, bot load, and infrastructure cost. View the original post
The crawler discussion has two sides
Publishers reasonably ask whether AI companies should be able to collect content without permission or compensation. Infrastructure teams face a second question: what does automated collection do to availability and cost?
A crawler that repeatedly misses cache, searches expensive routes, or downloads large responses can consume meaningful bandwidth and compute. Even when the traffic is not malicious, it can still be operationally harmful.
Start by identifying behavior
Do not treat every bot user agent as trustworthy, and do not assume every unknown request is hostile. Review CDN, load balancer, WAF, and application logs to understand request rate, paths, cache status, geography, response size, and origin time.
The useful distinction is behavioral: well-identified crawlers that respect policy, noisy automation that can be rate-limited, and abusive traffic that should be challenged or blocked.
Protect expensive paths first
Search endpoints, login flows, dynamic APIs, large documents, and uncached pages deserve tighter controls than public cached assets. A global rule is easy to deploy but more likely to damage legitimate integrations or search visibility.
Use scoped rate limits, cache policy improvements, managed reputation signals, and explicit allow rules where a business integration is known. Keep rule intent documented and reversible.
Measure business impact, not blocked-request totals
A WAF dashboard can make a large block count look like success. The better measures are reduced origin work, stable latency, fewer resource spikes, controlled transfer cost, and no decline in legitimate discovery or customer activity.
Crawler policy belongs to product, content, security, and infrastructure owners together. Blocking is a business decision supported by technical evidence.
Make governance explicit
Document which crawlers are allowed, limited, or denied; who can change the policy; and how exceptions are reviewed. Revisit it as providers, user agents, and business partnerships change.
The aim is not to eliminate automated traffic. It is to keep content control, reliability, and cloud spending intentional.