AI web crawlers are destroying websites in their never-ending content hunger

I run a small-but-growing boutique hosting infrastructure for agency clients. The AI bot crawler problem recently got severe enough that I couldn't just ignore it anymore.

I'm stuck between, on one end, crawlers from companies that absolutely have the engineering talent and resources to do things right but still aren't, and on the other end, resource-heavy WordPress installations where the client was told it was a build-it-and-forget-it kind of thing. I can't police their robots.txt files; meanwhile, each page load can take a full 1s round trip (most of that spent in MySQL), there are about 6 different pretty aggressive AI bots, and occasionally they'll get stuck on some site's product variants or categories pages and start hitting it at a 1r/s rate.

There's an invisible caching layer that does a pretty nice job with images and the like, so it's not really a bandwidth problem. The bots aren't even requesting images and other page resources very often; they're just doing tons and tons of page requests, and each of those is tying up a DB somewhere.

Cumulatively, it is close to having a site get Slashdotted every single day.

I finally started filtering out most bot and crawler traffic at nginx, before it gets passed off to a WP container. I spent a fair bit of time sampling traffic from logs, and at a rough guess, I'd say maybe 5% of web traffic is currently coming from actual humans. It's insane.

I've just wrapped up the first round of work for this problem, but that's just buying a little time. Now, I've gotta put together an IP intelligence system, because clearly these companies aren't gonna take "403" for an answer.

The Cathedral won. Full stop. Everyone, more or less, is just a stonecutter, competing to sell the best stone (i.e. content, libraries, source code, tooling) for building the cathedrals with. If the world is a farmer's market, we're shocked that the farmer's market is not defeating Walmart, and never will.

People want Cathedrals; not Bazaars. Being a Bazaar vendor is a race to the bottom. This is not the Cathedral exploiting a "tragedy of the commons," it's intrinsic to decentralization as a whole. The Bazaar feeds the Cathedral, just as the farmers feed Walmart, just as independent websites feed Claude, a food chain and not an aberration.

Let's say there's two competing options in some market. One option is fully commercialized, the other option holds to open-source ideals (whatever those are).

The commercial option attracts investors, because investors like money. The money attracts engineers, because at some point "hacker" came to mean "comfortable lifestyle in a high COL area". The commercial option gets all the resources, it gets a marketing team, and it captures 75% of the market because most people will happily pay a few dollars for something they don't have to understand.

The open source option attracts a few enthusiasts (maybe; or, often, just one), who labor at it in whatever spare time they can scrape together. Because it's free, other commercial entities use and rely on the open source thing, as long it continues to be maintained in something that, if you squint, resembles slave labor. The open source option is always a bit harder to use, with fewer features, but it appeals to the 25% of the market that cares about things like privacy or ownership or self-determination.

So, one conclusion is "people want Cathedrals", but another conclusion could be that all of our society's incentives are aligned towards Cathedrals.

It would be insane, after all, to not pursue wealth just because of some personal ideals.