AI bots threatening the existence of your favourite websites

(Image: Depositphotos)

Sun, 06 Jul 2025

By Shira OvideToshit Panigrahi broke the bad news recently to a large sports website: It had a bunch of artificial intelligence freeloaders.About 13 million times in a month, the website was visited not by humans but by AI companies’ automated software that crawled over the site like digital arachnids to siphon information for AI programs.Only about 600 actual humans were drawn to the sports site as a result of the information sucked up by the AI bots or crawlers, as the automated programs are often called, according to Panigrahi, the co-...

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