What You Don’t Know About Who’s Accessing Your Website
This could be costing you. Why hidden crawlers, AI bots, and security scanners are draining your resources — and what to do about it
Most website owners think their traffic comes from people. They’re wrong.
Behind the scenes, over 40% of web traffic today is bots — and while some of those bots are helpful (like Google indexing your content), many are commercial crawlers profiting off your site, AI scrapers extracting your content, or worse: malicious bots probing for security holes.
If you don’t know who they are — or can’t see them — you’re flying blind.
The Silent Visitors You’re Not Seeing
If you use analytics tools like WP Statistics, Jetpack, or MonsterInsights, you might assume all your visitors are human. But those tools are designed for marketing teams, not forensic analysis. They usually filter out bots by default, hiding a big chunk of what’s really happening on your site.
You’re missing:
- AI crawlers vacuuming your content into training datasets
- Security scanners testing for vulnerabilities
- SEO tools extracting your site data for competitor research
- Scrapers duplicating your content for their own profit
- Empty User-Agent bots — often the worst kind, hiding their identity on purpose
Here’s Who’s Actually Accessing Your Website
🧠 AI Bots (Training LLMs on Your Content)
These bots download your content to feed it into large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, or LLaMA. While some are transparent, others are stealthy.
| Bot Name | Purpose | Should You Be Concerned? |
|---|---|---|
| GPTBot (OpenAI) | AI training | Only if you want to protect original content |
| CCBot (Common Crawl) | Public LLM dataset | High resource use; opt-out available |
| ClaudeBot (Anthropic) | LLM training | Often doesn’t honor robots.txt |
Even if you support open AI, remember: you’re footing the hosting bill.
🕵️♂️ Security & Vulnerability Scanners
These bots are designed to test your site for weaknesses — sometimes for good (site monitoring), sometimes for cybercrime.
| Bot Name | Purpose | Real Use or Recon? |
|---|---|---|
| SiteLockSpider | Web host scanner | Sometimes automatic, sometimes excessive |
| WPScan | WordPress vulnerability check | Used by white-hat and black-hat hackers |
| Acunetix | Advanced scanning suite | May test for SQL/XSS, admin paths, etc. |
💼 Commercial SEO Bots and Data Harvesters
Many crawlers exist only to make a profit from your content — pulling product data, scraping contact details, and monitoring pricing.
| Bot Name | Purpose | Who They Work For |
|---|---|---|
| AhrefsBot | SEO/backlink analysis | SEO companies |
| DataProvider | Business web scraping | Research resellers |
| SemrushBot | SERP and keyword data | Marketing tools |
They’re not evil — but they don’t pay you for using your server resources.
🚨 Stealthy or Malicious Crawlers
These are the most worrying. They mask their identity or use generic tools like curl and python-requests to appear harmless.
| User-Agent | Behavior | Threat Level |
|---|---|---|
| (empty) | Masked bot, identity hidden | ⚠️⚠️⚠️ High |
| curl/, python-requests | Scripted scraping tools | ⚠️⚠️ High |
| IPs with no hostname | Often VPNs or proxies | ⚠️ Medium |
Why Don’t Commercial Plugins Show You This?
Because they’re built for marketing, not security. Plugins like WP Statistics or Jetpack usually:
- Filter out bots entirely
- Hide or don’t log User-Agent and IP address
- Don’t show reverse DNS or bot type
If you want to see this kind of info, you need a tool like my Visitor Report Plugin — which tracks IP, User-Agent, hostname, and more.
What This Means for Your Website
These hidden crawlers can:
- Consume bandwidth and slow your site down
- Inflate your hosting costs
- Expose your site to hackers and scanners
- Extract your original content to power other people’s businesses (or AI models)
And you won’t know it’s happening unless you monitor them directly.
How to Fight Back (Without Losing Search Rankings)
- Use a real visitor tracker — one that logs IP, User-Agent, and hostname.
- Control access via robots.txt:
User-agent: CCBot Disallow: / User-agent: DataProvider Disallow: / User-agent: SiteLockSpider Disallow: / - Monitor for empty or suspicious User-Agents and block via .htaccess or firewall.
- Consider a crawl delay to reduce server load:
User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 10
Final Thought: You’re the Host. You Set the Rules.
Your website is like your house. You wouldn’t let strangers snoop around your rooms without knowing why they’re there — or if they’re taking something valuable.
Crawlers cost you money.
Some steal your content.
Others quietly exploit your resources.
It’s time to stop being polite and start being aware.
Contact me: www.websitesos.net