AI crawlers raise concerns over website click-through rates, Hostinger research shows

hostinger has issued a warning signal that the increasing number of AI crawlers on websites is a bad thing because the traffic they produce could be the reason for the lower numbers of actual visits to sites. The company’s recent analysis suggests that automated bots from Google, Meta, and OpenAI alone account for between 60 and 85 percent of daily visits across customer domains.

According to Giedrius Zakaitis, Hostinger’s chief product and technology officer, these bots routinely scrape websites to fuel AI-generated answers for user queries. While this practice helps searchers get quick summaries, it may discourage them from visiting the original sources. Zakaitis cautioned that “only a few readers will click through” if generative tools serve the complete response upfront.

The research examined traffic across more than 5 million sites and found that roughly a third of the most active crawlers were linked to AI providers. Beyond the leading trio, bots from Apple, ByteDance, and Huawei’s Petal Search reached up to a quarter of surveyed domains.

Meanwhile, lighter activity came from Anthropic, Amazon, and Perplexity, which together accounted for no more than 5 percent of daily site visits. On the other hand, Hostinger discovered that a crawler’s job might be to move from one domain to another. Hence, the process of following would not be so simple.

The matter has complicated the implications for businesses. Some of them have started to use generative engine optimization as a tool to increase the visibility of AI powered responses. However, this strategy has its cons. For example, if fewer people decide to check the original content after they have read the AI summary, then websites that rely on traffic for revenue will have a hard time.

In order to solve the problem, Hostinger has come up with a new feature called AI Audit, which is part of its CDN service. The device aids users to recognize the access of crawlers to their sites, to familiarize with the timing of they visits and to decide whether they want to block the particular bots or not.

The discussion is just one example of the transformation in online visibility and revenue models, which is deeply impacted by the use of generative AI. While search engines and chatbots are still very popular means of getting information, the issue of content creators receiving the rightful share of the value is still under consideration.