AI crawlers are hammering sites and nearly taking them offline

Websites claim they’re collateral damage for the AI revolution’s voracious appetite for information—but companies like Anthropic and OpenAI say their bots aren’t to blame.

Kyle Wiens recognized something was wrong in July when his staff at iFixit, a website outlining how to fix common household items, began receiving alerts about high traffic on their cellphones. The development team behind the website began looking at the tool that tracks their web traffic (as a highly visited website, iFixit regularly keeps an eye on how many people visit the site). “It became pretty clear that it was clogged,” Wiens says.