AI Scraping and Website Performance: What Hosting Clients Need to Know4 min read

The rise of artificial intelligence has brought a wave of innovation – but also some hidden risks for website owners, including AI scraping. This is when bots harvest your website content without consent to help train large AI models. While this may sound like a problem for tech giants to solve, the impact hits much closer to home, especially for our hosting clients.

If you manage a website – big or small – understanding how AI bots affect website performance and what Sharp Innovations can do to help is essential.

What Is AI Scraping and Why Should You Care?

AI scraping refers to automated bots accessing and extracting publicly available content from websites to train artificial intelligence systems. These bots often operate under generic or obscure names, sometimes ignoring conventional crawling rules defined in your website’s robots.txt file.

Unlike search engine crawlers, which are generally beneficial to your site’s visibility, AI scrapers can be aggressive and uninvited. Their goal isn’t to drive traffic to your website – it’s to feed algorithms used by companies to improve AI tools like chatbots, content generators, and image models.

For site owners, the concern isn’t just philosophical – it’s practical. These bots use server resources and introduce new performance and security concerns that your hosting plan may not be designed to handle.

How AI Scraping Affects Website Performance

You might think a few extra bots won’t hurt your site – but that’s not always true. Over time, high volumes of bot traffic from AI scrapers can degrade website performance noticeably.

Here’s how:

• Slower Load Times: Each bot visit consumes bandwidth and server CPU cycles. Multiple bots crawling your site in parallel can slow response times for legitimate visitors.
• Increased Page Requests: AI bots often crawl entire sites in one session, hitting every page, including those you may not want exposed.
• Downtime Risks: For sites on shared hosting, a surge of bot traffic can overload resources, leading to timeouts or outages.

In short, AI bots might be invisible, but they leave a very real footprint on your website’s hosting environment.

Understanding the Server Load Caused by AI Bots

Server load refers to the amount of computational demand placed on your hosting server—measured in CPU cycles, memory usage, and bandwidth consumption. AI scraping can spike these metrics unexpectedly.

Unlike search engine bots that crawl gradually and respect crawl rate guidelines, AI bots may aggressively scan multiple pages simultaneously. Your hosting account has limited resources (as is often the case with shared hosting), that traffic can cause bottlenecks or even crash the server.

Some AI scrapers also ignore caching rules, forcing your server to generate fresh pages on every visit – further increasing the load. On a larger scale, frequent scraping can slow down all sites on a shared server, frustrating users and potentially harming your SEO rankings due to longer load times.

How Sharp Innovations Can Help Protect Your Site

The good news is that Sharp Innovations’ support team can play a vital role in managing this issue. We already have tools in place to help mitigate unwanted traffic.

Here’s how we can assist:

• Traffic Monitoring: Support can help identify abnormal traffic patterns that may indicate bot scraping.
• Firewall Configuration: Support can set up rules to block known AI scraper IP addresses or apply rate limiting to suspicious traffic.
• Optimization: If your site is under strain, support can help optimize your hosting environment by tweaking your website’s robots.txt file and PHP settings or make sure that plugins are up to date.
• Bot Blocklists: We maintain updated blocklists for known scrapers and have implemented those at the server level.
• CloudFlare: Support can move your domain’s name servers and DNS records to a managed CloudFlare account – which has tools for managing traffic and improves website performance and availability.

If you’re seeing slow performance or suspect your site is being scraped, don’t wait – contact the Sharp Innovations’ support team and ask what protections are available.

We’re Here to Help

AI scrapers are here – and they’re likely visiting your site more than you realize. While their goals may seem distant, the effect on website performance and user experience is very real for clients visiting your website.

If you’re concerned about the effect of AI on your website traffic, Sharp Innovations is here to support you. Our team brings years of experience in programming and web hosting to guide and inform our clients about internet processes. A free consultation with our experts is just a button click away!

By understanding how these bots operate and working with Sharp Innovations to monitor and mitigate them, you can ensure your site stays fast, secure, and resilient. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us or reach out to our support team at support@sharpinnovations.com.