A number of archaeological/humanities websites are reporting problems with the sheer volume of traffic caused by web crawlers belonging to the various large language model (LLM) generative artificial intelligence systems like ChatGTP, Gemini, CoPilot, and Claude, for instance. Their impact can have the same effect as a Distributed Denial of Service attack, overwhelming the systems. Of late, Knowledge Commons has reported such problems (e.g. Mastodon post), as has Open Context (e.g. Blog post). As Eric Kansa describes it, the AI bots frequently ignore directives designed to protect the site against such activities while Kathleen Fitzpatrick says that dealing with the bots sent out by extractive AI companies threatens the future development of the Knowledge Commons site. Indeed, in the replies to her post, it’s clear that the problem is experienced widely – Reclaim (the company hosting this site) report similar problems, while Tom Elliot suggests the Pleiades Gazetteer might have to require logins even for read-only access. Hosting and internet infrastructure companies can do their best to block excessive traffic, but a blanket ban on access – by, for instance, disallowing an AI’s user agents via a robots.txt file (assuming they take notice of it) or trying to block them at the firewall – isn’t necessarily desirable if you specifically want your information to get wide circulation and use. But if you go down a more permissive route, what then?