I was stunned to learn recently that at any given moment, there are now more bots than humans on the web. Of course, we know of the crawlers and spiders that maintain search indexes. And we've heard plenty about the nefarious botnets that cause havoc in the form of DDoS attacks. Most recently, AI bots are consuming content either to generate and tune large language models (LLMs) or as part of agentic behaviors. All these bots are causing problems. At Fermyon, we've started taking a good look at how to solve these problems. A sampling of the bot problems Here are a few of the problems that we're hearing about. All these are caused by bots, but the sources and impacts are distinct. Competitive scrapers In the world of ecommerce, it is not uncommon for competitors (particularly smaller, lesser-known ones) to crawl big-name sites with the intent of undercutting prices. From automotive to clothes to food to tools, we've heard this story across a wide array of ecommerce stores.…