AI bots flood developer’s site after Hacker News post
Sammy, creator of the customizable feed reader sprinklz.io, saw traffic spike after posting to Hacker News in September. Within days, their site faced painfully slow performance due to AI bot traffic, with nearly half of requests coming from a single service that repeatedly queried their site for updates. The service, which summarizes website changes into AI newsletters, made many requests per…
Key points
- Sammy’s **sprinklz.io** saw **AI bot traffic** after a Hacker News post, causing **painful slowness**
- **Nearly half of requests** came from one service querying for website updates at high frequency
- Sammy blocked bots via **robots.txt** and added rate limits to mitigate the issue
Sammy blocked the service via robots.txt and added rate limits, attributing the issue to AI-driven scraping rather than human visitors. They also discovered other AI bots—including Claude bot, OpenAI bot, and Google’s search indexer—alongside vulnerability scanners. The experience led Sammy to optimize their infrastructure for higher QPS (queries per second) and better scalability under heavy load. The incident highlights how AI tools can unintentionally generate abusive traffic patterns for small websites.
I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI bot traffic
sammystraus.com · 13 October 2026Loading the full article…
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Coverage and discussion
1source- Hacker News discussion · 41 pointsnews.ycombinator.com
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