Google Warns: AI Bots May Overwhelm the Web With Crawling ‘Congestion’

Source: Image designed by Martech Scholars using Canva Pro_Visual representation of Google’s warning about AI bots causing potential web congestion due to increased automated crawling.

A Google engineer has sounded the alarm: AI bots are about to flood the internet, and your website may not be ready.

Gary Illyes, a member of Google’s Search Relations team, recently appeared on the Search Off the Record podcast, warning that AI-powered agents are beginning to saturate the web with automated traffic. “Everyone and my grandmother is launching a crawler,” he said—highlighting a growing problem that isn’t about crawling itself.

AI Agents Are the New Traffic Problem

In conversation with Martin Splitt from the same team, Illyes cautioned that the surge in AI tools—used for content generation, data mining, and market analysis—is resulting in massive increases in traffic. These tools rely on scraping web pages to gather data, adding significant strain to already busy servers.

“The web is getting congested,” Illyes said. “It’s not something the web cannot handle… but the volume is increasing fast.”

Google’s Unified Crawling System

The podcast episode also detailed how Google crawlers work. Instead of separate crawlers for each service (like Search, AdSense, or Gmail), Google employs a unified system. All crawlers share the same infrastructure but use distinct user agents. This ensures consistency and respect for site limitations via robots.txt and health signals.

Illyes emphasized that Google’s system allows customization while remaining efficient:
“You can fetch with it from the internet but you have to specify your own user agent string.”

It’s Not the Crawling—It’s the Indexing

Illyes broke from traditional SEO thinking with a bold claim: crawling isn’t what burns server resources.
“It’s not crawling that is eating up the resources, it’s indexing and potentially serving,” he said—adding, half-jokingly, that he expects backlash for this opinion.

This revelation shifts focus. Instead of worrying about how often a page is crawled, webmasters should focus on how data is processed and stored.

A History of Web Growth

To understand today’s congestion, the Googlers looked back. In 1994, World Wide Web Worm indexed just 110,000 pages. Today, even small websites can exceed that number. This explosive growth pushed crawler evolution—from HTTP 1.1 to HTTP/2, with HTTP/3 coming soon.

Google’s Efficiency vs. AI Overload

Illyes noted that Google is actively reducing its crawl footprint, but new AI products quickly reverse those gains.
“You saved seven bytes… and this new product will add back eight,” he said—illustrating the never-ending cycle of optimization and expansion.

What Site Owners Should Do Now

Illyes suggests immediate actions for webmasters:

• Upgrade Infrastructure: Evaluate hosting performance, CDN usage, and server response times.
• Control Access: Use robots.txt to block unnecessary crawlers while allowing legitimate traffic.
• Optimize Databases: Focus on minimizing expensive queries and improving caching mechanisms.

Monitoring is also key. Understanding which bots are visiting—whether good, bad, or AI-driven—is crucial to protecting your resources.

A Call for Smarter Crawling

Illyes floated the idea of a collaborative approach like Common Crawl, where one central crawl is shared, reducing redundancy. Such cooperation could help tame the AI crawler chaos.

Conclusion: Prepare Now, or Be Overwhelmed

Illyes’ warning is clear: the AI wave is coming. It’s not just about Googlebot anymore—countless AI agents are actively crawling and learning from your site. Strengthening your infrastructure today could save you from a traffic nightmare tomorrow.

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