First, the rise in automation and AI technologies has led to an increase in the deployment of bots for various purposes, including SEO, competitive analysis, and data scraping. This means websites can experience intensified activity as bots probe them for data.

Second, there are seasonal or event-driven spikes in bot traffic. For instance, sales events or major company announcements may attract more bots attempting to index the latest information as quickly as possible.

Third, some bots may not adhere to standard protocols outlined in robots.txt, leading to excessive server demand as they might attempt to crawl pages they’re not supposed to or try to do so at a high frequency.

The impact of excessive bot activity can be significant, often resulting in server strain or crashes, as seen in the reports of freezing web servers under loads. To manage this, consider implementing more refined bot management tools that can distinguish between legitimate bot traffic and malicious or unnecessary crawlers. These tools can help you rate-limit requests, block certain bots, or use CAPTCHAs to verify human interaction, which can substantially reduce server load and mitigate the impact of unwanted bots. Additionally, setting up alerts and monitoring traffic patterns can help to quickly identify and troubleshoot new bot traffic surges.