I run a small side project on Vercel. Last month my bandwidth bill was 3x higher than usual. No viral traffic, no new features. Just bots. Here is what I found and how to fix it. The "Hidden" Bandwidth Tax In 2026, the internet is no longer just for humans. AI crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Bytespider, and PerplexityBot — are aggressively indexing the web to train new models and power real-time search engines. While traditional search engines like Google are relatively polite, AI bots are often greedy. They don't just index your home page — they hit your dynamic routes, parse your JSON, and re-crawl your assets multiple times a day. Why this kills you on Vercel Vercel is incredible for performance, but bandwidth egress (the data sent from your server to the visitor) is where costs scale. A polite bot: Hits your page once a week = negligible cost An AI swarm: Hits your high-data routes 20 times an hour = a $50 bill by end of week How to see the "ghost" traffic Most developers just look at total request counts.…