Normal search engine spiders did/do cause problems but not on the scale of AI scrapers. Search engine spiders tend to follow a robots.txt, look at the sitemap.xml, and generally try to throttle requests. You'll find some that are poorly behaved but they tend to get blocked and either die out or get fixed and behave better.

The AI scrapers are atrocious. They just blindly blast every URL on a site with no throttling. They are terribly written and managed as the same scraper will hit the same site multiple times a day or even hour. They also don't pay any attention to context so they'll happily blast git repo hosts and hit expensive endpoints.

They're like a constant DOS attack. They're hard to block at the network level because they span across different hyperscalers' IP blocks.

Puts on tinfoil hat: Maybe it isn’t AI scrapers, but actually is a massive dos attack, and it’s a conspiracy to get people to not self-host.