Just learned someone was charged $90 in extra hosting fees because AI crawlers flooded their website with traffic.
Not bots from search engines.
Not real users.
Just language models (LLMs) scooping up content, and even ignoring robots.txt instructions.
This isn't just inefficient. It's exploitative.
The web was not meant to work like this.
Creators and small websites shouldn’t pay the price for AI growth.
So here's the question:
How do we stop this?
How do we protect small businesses?
Because this really, really bothers me.