AI Agents Are Coming for Your Website

Something shifted last year. More than half of web traffic now comes from bots, and these are not the dumb scrapers we used to ignore. AI agents are browsing websites, filling out forms, clicking buttons, and taking actions. If you run a WordPress site, this affects you whether you realize it or not.

These Are Not Your Father's Bots

Googlebot crawls your pages and leaves. It reads, indexes, and moves on. The new generation of AI agents actually uses your website. They navigate checkout flows, submit contact forms, and interact with your content like a human would.

I started noticing this in my analytics last year. Sessions that looked human but felt off. High engagement times on pages that should not take that long to read. Form submissions that seemed too perfect. When I dug into the server logs, I found AI user agents I had never seen before.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft. They are all building agents that operate computers autonomously. ChatGPT now has an agent mode. Anthropic launched something called Claude Cowork. These tools browse the web on behalf of users, and your WordPress site is part of that web.

The Numbers Are Staggering

AI bot traffic increased over 300% on major networks in the past year. GPTBot requests nearly tripled. Meta's agent traffic grew over 800%. The landscape shifted so fast that most site owners have no idea what is actually hitting their servers.

Here is the uncomfortable part. These AI companies crawl far more than they send back. For every visitor Anthropic refers to a website, they crawl roughly 50,000 pages. OpenAI is almost 900 to 1. They are taking a lot more value than they return.

In my experience, most WordPress site owners have no visibility into this. Standard analytics tools do not break out AI agent traffic. You see sessions, but you do not know which ones are humans and which ones are Claude doing research for someone.

What Most People Get Wrong

The common assumption is that robots.txt solves this problem. Just add a few lines to block the bots you do not want. Simple enough.

Except it is not that simple. Robots.txt only works when bots identify themselves honestly. Perplexity got caught last year masking their traffic as regular browsers. Millions of requests across tens of thousands of sites, all pretending to be human visitors. Your robots.txt rules meant nothing.

The other mistake is assuming you should block everything. Maybe you should, maybe you should not. Blocking AI crawlers might protect your content, but it also makes you invisible to AI search systems that increasingly drive discovery. There is no free lunch here.

What surprised me most was realizing that inaction is also a choice. If you do not actively manage AI access to your site, you are passively allowing whatever happens to happen. For some sites that is fine. For others it is a problem they will not notice until it matters.

The Reliability Problem

AI agents are impressive but not reliable. Last year, Google's own agent accidentally deleted a user's entire drive instead of a specific folder. Replit's agent wiped a production database during what was supposed to be a read only operation. A major Australian bank had to reverse layoffs after their AI voice bot failed so spectacularly that call volumes actually increased.

When these agents interact with your site, they will make mistakes. Forms submitted with wrong data. Checkout flows abandoned mid process. Edge cases handled badly. This is not a knock on the technology. It is just where things stand right now.

If you run a WooCommerce store or any site where user actions have real consequences, this matters. An AI agent placing an order on behalf of a user who did not quite mean to place that order creates a support headache at minimum.

Publishers Are Feeling This First

Google referral traffic dropped over 30% globally last year. Zero click searches now represent nearly 70% of all searches. When someone asks ChatGPT a question and gets an answer synthesized from your content, you provided value but got nothing back.

Major publishers lost half their search traffic in some cases. Staff cuts followed. This is the canary in the coal mine for smaller sites. If AI systems can answer user questions without sending traffic, the economics of content creation change fundamentally.

I do not think the answer is panic. But I also do not think the answer is pretending this is not happening.

The Tradeoff You Have to Make

You can try to manage all this manually. Monitor your server logs. Research which AI bots exist and what user agents they use. Update your robots.txt whenever a new crawler appears. Create an llms.txt file to help AI systems understand your site structure. Keep up with which bots are respecting the rules and which are not.

That is a lot of ongoing work for something most site owners never even think about.

Or you can use a tool that handles it for you. Track the bots automatically. Generate the files AI systems expect to find. Get visibility without the maintenance burden.

Where This Is Going

The open web is under pressure. MIT Technology Review warned that we are heading toward a future of logins, paywalls, and access restrictions everywhere. If AI systems keep extracting value without reciprocity, site owners will respond by making their content harder to access.

For WordPress site owners, the choice is not whether to engage with this shift. It is how. Understanding what is happening on your site is the starting point. Everything else follows from that visibility.

That is why we built our plugin to handle this quietly in the background. Track the bots, generate the files, surface the data. You have enough to worry about without manually researching AI crawler user agents.