We've deployed GRR Bot Protection across every plan — here's why, and what it means for you
If your website has felt the internet get busier lately, you're not imagining it. For the first time in a decade, more than half of all web traffic is now automated — bots, not people. In 2025, automated traffic overtook human traffic for the first time, reaching 51% of all web traffic, and 37% of all traffic came from bad bots — up from 32% the year before (Imperva 2025 Bad Bot Report).
A big chunk of that surge is AI. Companies training large language models have unleashed crawlers that hammer websites for content — often ignoring the polite "please don't" rules that well-behaved crawlers have respected for decades. To give you a sense of scale: one analysis found a single AI fetcher bot making 39,000 requests per minute to one website, and site owners reporting 30TB of bandwidth swallowed in a month by crawlers alone (The Register, Search Engine Journal). The Wikimedia Foundation — one of the biggest sites on earth — reported bandwidth up over 50% purely from AI crawlers.
For a small business site, that isn't an abstract problem. It's the reason your pages can suddenly slow to a crawl, your server bill creeps up, and your content gets scraped and reused without your say-so.
So we did something about it. We custom-built GRR Bot Protection, and it's now live on every single hosting plan we offer.
What is GRR Bot Protection, in plain English?
GRR Bot Protection is our own gatekeeper, built and tuned by our engineers, that sits in front of your website. Before any visitor reaches your site, it quietly asks their browser to solve a tiny maths puzzle — a "proof of work." A real person's browser solves it in a fraction of a second and they never notice a thing. But a scraper bot trying to hit thousands of pages a minute suddenly finds every single request now costs it real computing effort. At that scale, the maths stops being worth it, and the bots move on.
We didn't reinvent the wheel to build it — and we won't pretend we did. GRR Bot Protection is built on proven, battle-tested proof-of-work technology that already defends some of the most demanding infrastructure on the internet: GNOME, FFmpeg, the Linux kernel archives, FreeCAD and even UNESCO all rely on the same approach. What we've done is take that hardened foundation, configure it properly, and deploy it across our whole network so every one of our customers gets it working out of the box. When the projects that maintain the software the internet runs on trust this approach to defend themselves, that tells you it works.
The clever part is the balance. A genuine visitor's browser solves the puzzle once, gets a pass that lasts a week, and sails straight through on every visit after that. The cost to a real customer is essentially zero. The cost to a bot trying to strip-mine your site is enormous.
What this means for you as a customer
Here's the honest, practical version — no jargon:
- Your site stays fast. When bots aren't gobbling your server's resources, there's more left for the people who actually matter: your customers. Fewer slowdowns, especially during those bot bursts that used to grind sites to a halt.
- You stop paying to feed scrapers. Bandwidth and server load driven by junk bot traffic is wasted money. GRR Bot Protection cuts a large slice of that out.
- Your content is harder to strip and reuse. Your words, your images, your product pages — bulk AI scrapers now hit a wall instead of an open door.
- Better protection against the nasty stuff. A lot of "bad bot" traffic isn't just AI training — it's probing for weaknesses, testing stolen passwords, and scraping data. Slowing the bots down is a real security win, not just a performance one.
- You didn't have to do anything. We built it, configured it, and rolled it out across every plan for you. No settings to change, no plugin to install, no invoice.
Being straight with you
We're not going to oversell this. No single tool blocks every bot forever — some scrapers have started learning to solve these puzzles, and we'd rather tell you that up front than pretend otherwise. GRR Bot Protection is one strong layer in a proper defence, not a magic wall. But it's a genuinely effective layer, it's built on foundations respected by the people who know infrastructure best, and it costs you nothing.
That's exactly the kind of quiet, behind-the-scenes work we think good hosting should do — the stuff you never have to think about, handled by people who do think about it, so your site just stays fast, safe and yours.
Questions about how this affects your site? You won't get a ticket queue or an outsourced help desk — reach out and talk to the actual engineers who run your infrastructure. That's been our way since 2009.