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AI Bots and Web Crawlers Are About to Flood the Internet – What Google’s Gary Illyes Is Warning Us About

The internet is on the verge of a significant shift. As artificial intelligence tools multiply at an unprecedented rate, the number of automated bots and web crawlers scraping websites is growing just as fast. Google’s own Gary Illyes recently sounded the alarm on this trend, warning that AI-driven web traffic could soon create serious congestion across the web. But what does this mean for website owners, SEO professionals, and the future of the internet itself?

In this article, we break down everything Illyes discussed on the Search Off the Record podcast, explain why AI crawlers are flooding websites, and offer practical guidance on what site owners can do to protect their resources while staying competitive in an increasingly automated digital landscape.

Who Is Gary Illyes and Why Does His Opinion Matter?

Gary Illyes is a prominent member of Google’s Search Relations team and a well-respected voice in the SEO and web development communities. When Illyes speaks about how Google interacts with the web, industry professionals pay close attention. His insights often reflect broader shifts happening behind the scenes at Google, giving website owners valuable early warnings about trends that could impact their digital presence.

His recent comments on the Search Off the Record podcast were especially striking because they painted a vivid picture of how rapidly the AI landscape is changing the behavior of bots across the web. His memorable observation that “everyone and my grandmother is launching a crawler” was both humorous and sobering – a sign that the problem is more widespread than many people realize.

The AI Bot Explosion – Why So Many Crawlers Are Being Launched

The rise of generative AI has created an enormous demand for fresh, accurate data. AI tools need vast amounts of web content to function effectively, whether they are being used for content creation, competitor research, market analysis, price comparison, or general data gathering. Each one of these use cases requires some form of web crawling, and the number of businesses and developers building these tools is growing exponentially.

Here are some of the primary reasons why AI-related crawlers are multiplying so rapidly:

• Content generation tools need to pull from real websites to create relevant, up-to-date material.
• Market research platforms use crawlers to monitor competitor pricing, product listings, and industry trends.
• AI training datasets require massive volumes of web content scraped from across the internet.
• Business intelligence tools crawl websites continuously to provide clients with real-time insights.
• Automated SEO tools conduct their own crawling to audit websites and track keyword rankings.

This creates a perfect storm of automated traffic that is only going to intensify as AI adoption continues to grow across industries worldwide.

What Illyes Said About Web Congestion and the Real Cost of Crawling

One of the most interesting and counterintuitive points that Illyes made during the podcast is that crawling itself is not the primary resource drain on websites and servers. This challenges a widely held belief in the SEO community that the act of a bot visiting and downloading pages is the main burden on infrastructure.

According to Illyes, the real costs come from what happens after a crawler visits a page. Indexing, serving data, and post-crawl processing are the activities that truly consume significant resources. This means that even a relatively polite crawler that does not hammer a website with rapid-fire requests can still contribute to a meaningful resource burden once all the downstream processing is factored in.

He acknowledged with some humor that this perspective might draw criticism from the SEO community, which has traditionally focused on crawl budget and crawl rate as the main concerns when managing bot traffic. But his point is well-taken: the cumulative cost of serving and processing data for hundreds of different AI crawlers adds up quickly, even when each individual crawler appears to be well-behaved.

Google’s Own Role in the Growing Crawl Load

Illyes also acknowledged that Google itself is not immune to contributing to this problem. The company has made efforts to reduce its own crawling footprint, including measures designed to save bytes per request and minimize unnecessary crawls. These optimizations have helped reduce the load that Googlebot places on servers around the world.

However, the rapid launch of new AI products – including Google’s own AI-powered search and assistant features – has quickly offset many of these efficiency gains. Each new product that requires fresh web data essentially creates a new demand cycle, pushing crawl volumes back up even as engineering teams work to bring them down. This creates an ongoing cycle of increasing load that is difficult to escape as long as AI development continues at its current pace.

It is a candid and somewhat surprising admission from someone inside one of the world’s most powerful tech companies – an acknowledgment that even Google is struggling to balance innovation with the practical demands placed on the web’s infrastructure.

Practical Solutions for Website Owners Dealing With AI Bot Traffic

So what can website owners and webmasters actually do to manage the growing flood of AI bots and automated crawlers? Illyes offered several suggestions that are worth taking seriously, and there are additional steps that SEO professionals recommend based on best practices in bot management.

Use Custom User-Agent Strings for Controlled Fetching

Illyes specifically highlighted the use of custom user-agent strings as an effective method for managing which crawlers can access your site and under what conditions. By identifying specific bots through their user-agent strings, website administrators can set up rules that allow, block, or throttle particular crawlers. This gives site owners much greater control over who is consuming their server resources and how frequently.

Update Your Robots.txt File Regularly

The robots.txt file remains one of the most important tools for controlling bot access. As new AI crawlers emerge, their user-agent identifiers are often published, allowing website owners to add them to their disallow rules if they choose. Keeping your robots.txt file up to date with the latest known AI crawler identifiers can significantly reduce unwanted bot traffic.

Consider the Common Crawl Model

Illyes pointed to Common Crawl as an example of a more sustainable approach to web data collection. Common Crawl is a non-profit organization that crawls the web once and then makes the resulting dataset freely available to researchers, businesses, and developers. Instead of every organization running its own crawler and placing independent loads on websites, they can simply use the shared Common Crawl dataset.

This model dramatically reduces redundant traffic and minimizes the collective burden on web infrastructure. Illyes suggested that encouraging more AI developers to adopt this kind of shared-data approach could be one meaningful way to slow the growth of web congestion caused by AI bots.

Monitor Your Server Logs for Unusual Bot Activity

Regularly reviewing your server logs is essential for identifying unexpected spikes in bot traffic. Many AI crawlers do not follow standard crawling etiquette, and some may ignore your robots.txt rules entirely. Monitoring tools and server-side firewall rules can help you identify and block aggressive crawlers before they consume excessive bandwidth or slow down your site for real human visitors.

Is the Web Strong Enough to Handle the AI Crawler Surge?

Despite the serious nature of the problem he was describing, Illyes remained fundamentally optimistic about the web’s ability to adapt and survive this wave of AI-driven crawler traffic. The internet has weathered many technological disruptions over the decades, and its decentralized, resilient architecture has repeatedly proven capable of absorbing new pressures.

That said, his optimism comes with an implicit call to action. The web will be fine – but only if developers, businesses, and platform owners take responsible steps to minimize unnecessary crawling, share data where possible, and respect the resources of the sites they are accessing. A free-for-all approach where every AI startup launches its own aggressive crawler without regard for the impact on web infrastructure is not sustainable in the long term.

What This Means for SEO Professionals and Digital Marketers

For SEO professionals, the insights from Illyes offer several important takeaways. First, the traditional focus on crawl budget – the idea that you need to make sure search engines can crawl your most important pages efficiently – remains valid, but it now needs to be expanded to include the management of non-Google crawlers as well.

Second, the emphasis on post-crawl processing as the real resource drain suggests that website performance and server capacity are going to become even more critical SEO factors in the coming years. A site that is slow to respond to requests from legitimate users because its server is overwhelmed by AI bots will struggle to perform well in organic search.

Finally, staying informed about the evolving bot landscape is going to be an essential skill for anyone working in digital marketing. As new AI tools continue to launch and each one brings its own crawler, the ability to identify, manage, and selectively allow or block bot traffic will become a core competency for webmasters and SEO professionals alike.

Final Thoughts – Preparing Your Website for the Age of AI Crawlers

Gary Illyes has done the web community a real service by shining a spotlight on the growing problem of AI-driven bot traffic. The picture he paints is challenging but not hopeless. The web is resilient, and there are concrete steps that website owners can take right now to protect their resources and maintain a great experience for human visitors.

By staying proactive about bot management, keeping robots.txt files updated, monitoring server logs, and advocating for shared data models like Common Crawl, the industry can collectively reduce the burden that AI crawlers place on web infrastructure. The age of AI is here to stay – and with the right strategies in place, your website can thrive within it rather than being overwhelmed by it.

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