AI Bots Overwhelm Independent Website Hosting

In 2026, independent website operators report that large language model crawlers from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic and others are systematically harvesting content, causing massive request spikes and hosting provider country blocks. Cloudflare's 2025 report notes AI bots made 4.2% of HTML requests, while Googlebot alone reached 11% of HTTP requests on April 26, 2025, and human traffic fell to 34.5%. Small sites face bandwidth strain and access disruptions.