Increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI) tools called ‘crawlers’ are being used to collect and analyse data on websites. Their use has exploded in the recent past due in large part to their capabilities of gathering large amounts of data quickly, efficiently, and without human intervention. However, recent reports suggest these crawler bots could be draining site resources and even skewing analytics. These crucial issues need immediate attention by any web administrator or digital marketer worth their salt.
AI bots or ‘crawlers’ are automated scripts that visit websites, scanning and indexing their content for various purposes. They are used by search engines like Google to rank pages, digital marketers for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and by various other businesses to collect specific data.
Recently, there has been an ever-growing concern that crawlers are increasingly consuming more bandwidth, draining away valuable resources. This improper use of bandwidth can slow down web pages, impact user experience, and even potentially increase costs for web managers.
Another compelling issue with these AI crawlers is the disturbing possibility of ‘polluting’ web analytics. Crawlers are not real people visiting your site; they are automated scripts. So every visit by a crawler gets registered in analytics as a user visit, thereby inflating the real visitor count. By interfering with traffic stats, crawlers may give a distorted picture of user behaviour, user engagement, and overall website performance.
This calls for more responsible and intelligent use of crawlers. One solution is to ensure crawlers follow the guidelines set out in the site’s robots.txt file. This is a file which lays out what pages or data from the site the crawler bots are allowed to access or not. Another approach is to discern between real human traffic and bot traffic, and accordingly adjust our reporting and analysis. Tools such as Google’s ‘reCaptcha’ and ‘Google Analytics’ have been effective in separating bot traffic from real human traffic.
Moreover, webmasters can also use cloaking, a technique that serves different content to crawlers than to human users. While this method comes with its own ethical implications, it may be used responsibly to preserve bandwidth and consistent analytics reporting.
However, these are just mitigating measures, not permanent solutions. The onus lies on the creators of these AI crawler bots to design and develop more responsible bots that respect a website’s resources while conducting their tasks.
In conclusion, while the rise of AI crawler bots in digital marketing offers promising opportunities for data collection and analysis, it presents significant challenges that need to be addressed. An appropriate blend of technology, ethics, and policy may be the key to benefiting from crawler bots without compromising on site performance and accurate data reporting. Therefore, marketers and web administrators need to be aware of the implications and adapt their strategies accordingly to continue to thrive in the digital landscape.
