AI-powered crawlers are showing up on e-commerce sites far more often than they used to. Some help your store, search indexers, link preview bots, and assistants that might recommend your products elsewhere. Others scrape aggressively, burn server resources, and bury your analytics in junk visits.
No matter the motivation behind them, these crawlers can’t be ignored. If your site slows down or your hosting bill doubles because a handful of AI training models are vacuuming your product pages every few seconds, that’s a problem. And it’s one that’s becoming surprisingly common.
The good news: you can control how these bots interact with your store. And if you’d rather not think about any of this, Curious Minds Media can help set things up, maintain monitoring, and apply the right balance of visibility and performance protection.
Why AI Crawlers Are Showing Up More Often
Search engines have always indexed public pages. Now, new AI systems, including training crawlers for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others, are gathering content at a much faster pace. They do this so they can summarize products, compare prices, and answer questions using publicly available pages.
Typical content they grab:
Product titles & descriptions
Pricing & discounts
Specs & inventory
Reviews & Q&A
Some of this is genuinely useful. If Perplexity or Google SGE can cite and link to your products, that’s another path for customers to find you. But when crawlers hammer your servers without restraint, they slow the website down and distort your analytics.
That’s why the key isn’t “allow everything” or “block everything.” It’s a structured approach, let the crawlers that help you do their thing, and control or shut out the ones that only cost you money and time.
This is exactly the stance Curious Minds Media has adopted in our infrastructure guidelines:
Allow search and AI crawlers that support visibility. Block or throttle bots that provide no value.
More on that below.
How to Spot AI Crawlers in Your Logs
You don’t need to spend hours combing through log entries. A few telltale signs usually get you most of the way there.
1) Traffic spikes with no matching improvement in sales
If traffic jumps 3–5× overnight but revenue stays flat, you’re almost certainly looking at automated visits.
2) Oddly short sessions
Bots bounce through hundreds of URLs in seconds. No human shops like that.
3) Suspicious or generic user-agents
Some crawlers proudly announce who they are, Googlebot, Bingbot, Facebook preview bots, etc. Others include random strings, browser disguises, or names that look real but aren’t.
4) Repetitive hits from the same IP group
If the same IP block is hitting product pages every few seconds, it’s not a person comparison shopping, it’s harvesting.
5) Inconsistent timing
Human traffic ebbs and flows. Bots fire requests at consistent intervals, day and night.
If you have Cloudflare, Fastly, or similar edge services, most of this becomes much easier. These tools can classify traffic and help you filter bad actors without touching your application code.
Curious Minds Media often installs these protections for clients who don’t have a dedicated DevOps engineer, it’s a straightforward add-on to most environments.
Which Bots Should You Allow, Slow Down, or Block?
A simple way to think about it:
Allow
These help customers find your business or preview your content elsewhere:
Googlebot
Bingbot
DuckDuckBot
Applebot
Social preview bots (Facebook, X/Twitter, LinkedIn)
CMM always keeps these allowed unless a client has unusual privacy needs.
We also allow newer AI training crawlers like:
GPTBot (OpenAI)
ClaudeBot (Anthropic)
CCBot (Common Crawl)
Google-Extended (Gemini / SGE)
PerplexityBot
Why? Because being visible across AI tools increases discovery and can drive referral traffic. Some platforms surface citation links directly to your site.
Throttle
Some crawlers aren’t malicious but can overwhelm your server with unnecessary load. Comparison engines or niche scrapers, for example, might pull your inventory every 30 minutes when you only update once a day.
Slowing them down, not blocking, is usually enough.
Block
These bots tend to:
Copy content
Repeatedly scrape pricing to undercut you
Hammer login or checkout paths
Run outdated / low-quality scrapers
How Curious Minds Media Approaches Bot & Crawler Control
We maintain a structured bot policy because every client has different hosting limits, compliance requirements, and business goals.
At a high level:
Allowed
Search indexers (Googlebot, Bingbot, DuckDuckBot)
AI training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, etc.)
Social previews (Facebook, X, LinkedIn)
Ads bots (AdsBot-Google)
Blocked
Most SEO scrapers (AhrefsBot, SemrushBot, DotBot, MJ12Bot)
Uptime monitors unless needed
Aggressive or unknown crawlers
Bots targeting sensitive URLs (/admin/, /api/, /wp-login.php)
Rate-Limited
At the infrastructure layer (Cloudflare, WAF, server firewall)
Suggested defaults:
Search bots: 5–15 requests/sec
AI crawlers: 1 request every 3–10 seconds
Social bots: 2–5 requests/sec
Scrapers: 1 request every 5 seconds
Unknown bots: 10 requests/min
This keeps legitimate bots functional while reducing the load from everything else.
Rate-Limiting Without Breaking Your Website
Rate-limiting protects your site from being overwhelmed, especially during major sales. It acts like a bouncer at the front door: people can come in, just not 10,000 at once.
Done well, visitors never notice. Done poorly, you can block the very bots that keep your products indexed.
A few guidelines:
Start with gentle rules and tighten them gradually
Apply rules by category, search, social, AI, unknown
Exclude checkout and cart screens from aggressive limits
Review logs during peak season and adjust as needed
If you’re not comfortable setting this up, CMM can configure the right levels and monitor traffic so nothing gets accidentally blocked.
A Real Example (Hypothetical)
Imagine an apparel retailer sees its mid-week traffic climb to five times the usual volume. At first, the team celebrates, it looks like an unexpected wave of shoppers has arrived. But conversions stay flat, and customer support starts getting messages about the site feeling sluggish.
A closer look at server logs shows a pattern: an unnamed AI crawler hitting more than a thousand product URLs per minute. Inventory on the site hardly changes throughout the day, yet this bot keeps re-scraping continuously as if it’s monitoring every minor update.
In this scenario, rate-limiting the crawler to just one request every few seconds would almost immediately relieve the strain. Pages load normally, customers stop noticing slowdowns, and the next month’s hosting invoice reflects the reduced traffic load.
No emergency rebuilds, no platform migration, just smart controls applied at the edge.
Compliance & Legal Notes
This isn’t legal advice, but CMM encourages clients to understand:
Public content scraped by AI bots may still fall under privacy laws (GDPR, CCPA)
Copyright disputes surrounding LLM training are ongoing
Allowing training crawlers is a business choice, not a passive default
We talk through these topics with clients before adjusting bot policy, particularly in healthcare, education, or regulated environments.
If you need to restrict training crawlers for compliance reasons, we can configure rules accordingly.
Quick Wins
Keep a simple allowlist of essential bots
Rate-limit everything else
Block scrapers aggressively
Inspect spikes sooner, not later
Avoid blocking CSS/JS/fonts, it hurts SEO
Monitor Cloudflare or server logs weekly
Even small tweaks make a very noticeable difference.
Final Thoughts
AI crawlers aren’t going away. Some help you get discovered; others freeload. You don’t have to chase every crawler by hand, you just need boundaries and a routine.
If you’re comfortable managing rate-limits, IP filtering, and logging, great. If you’d rather have a partner handle it, and keep an eye on how search and AI exposure affects visibility, Curious Minds Media can help.
We routinely:
Build & maintain bot policy
Configure Cloudflare WAF and rate-limits
Monitor traffic patterns
Protect SEO crawlability
Advise on AI training exposure
Support WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, and custom builds
Provide full-service development and devops support
If you’re heading toward a seasonal traffic surge, or you’ve already seen tell-tale bot spikes, you don’t have to tackle it alone.
We can help you keep your store fast, stable, and visible where it counts.
Just reach out.
