Good Bot. Bad Bot. Gray Bot.
What to do about New AI Bots
Organizations that once dealt with predictable search engine crawlers now face an explosion of AI-driven bot traffic that follows entirely different rules. So what should you do?
Traditional bot management strategies were designed for a simpler time when "good bots" were easily identifiable and "bad bots" were clearly malicious. Those strategies no longer adequately address today's reality. Health organizations now face a new category, gray bots, that are legitimate but resource-intensive, crawling 1,700 to 73,000+ pages for every visitor they refer back. For IT leaders, the stakes are particularly high: medical misinformation, regulatory compliance, patient privacy, and infrastructure costs all intersect with bot management decisions.
What You'll Learn
- The Gray Bot Challenge: Why AI crawlers don't fit traditional "good" or "bad" categories, and how to develop strategic responses for this new reality
- Real Infrastructure Impact: Case studies showing organizations experiencing 300% traffic increases and achieving 67-90% reductions through targeted remediation
- Detection and Monitoring: Practical techniques for identifying bot traffic patterns, distinguishing signal from noise in your analytics, and protecting infrastructure before problems arise
- Tactical Response Strategies: Immediate actions you can take from intelligent caching and rate limiting to fine grained robots.txt management
- Future-Ready Planning: How to prepare for the agent-to-agent future and build infrastructure that handles both current and emerging bot traffic
Why It Matters
One organization experienced website search functionality failing because bot traffic exceeded infrastructure capacity limits. Another saw 4.2 million bot-based page views in a single month — representing massive costs with zero patient value.
This guide shows health IT leaders how to protect infrastructure, reduce operating costs, and maintain AI discoverability without sacrificing consumer experience or enabling competitive intelligence extraction.