I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI bot traffic

	I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI bot traffic(sammystraus.com)
	326 points by sammy0910 19 hours ago \| 171 comments
	tl;dr: After posting their customizable feed reader sprinklz.io to HN, the author found their site crushed not by HN traffic but by AI bots—nearly half from a single service scraping the site to generate an AI newsletter, plus Claude, OpenAI, and Google crawlers. They blocked the worst offenders, added a robots.txt and rate limits, and are now focused on making the site more performant under load.
	HN Discussion: ↑Aggressive blocking of entire cloud provider ASNs is necessary due to rampant abuse and scraping ↑Sharing specific defensive tools and techniques like blocklists, Anubis challenges, and basic auth ~Bot traffic can be analyzed and selectively blocked by distinguishing crawler types and request patterns ↑Personal horror stories confirming the scale and cost of AI bot traffic abuse ↑Posting publicly attracts both legitimate attention and immediate malicious activity