Key facts
- Paulus said the visitor identified itself as Meta External Agent, a fact later backed up by SiteGround operators.
- Meta's developer webpage says a Meta External Agent crawls the web for uses such as training foundation AI models.
- Paulus said she removed the webpage link from her Instagram profile to prevent human clicks that could take the site offline.
- Paulus said she lacks the means to pay for a higher traffic allowance because bots are not customers and generate no income.
- A Meta spokesperson said the company respects the preferences site owners set through robots.txt.
- SiteGround did not respond to a request for comment, Business Insider reported.
A San Diego-based artist said a Meta crawler bot visited her website more than 550,000 times in 48 hours, consuming nearly all of her site's traffic allowance, according to a Business Insider report published November 3, 2026. Chelsea Paulus, a children's author and illustrator, told Business Insider that the automated visitor overwhelmed her website's hosting resources and forced her to troubleshoot with her hosting provider.
Paulus said she has operated her business for a decade and became a full-time artist last year, after working in tech and web design. She said she quickly realized something was wrong when traffic started piling up. "I do not believe this is any kind of intentional or malicious attack from Meta," Paulus said. "But small business owners need to be aware this could happen and be given tools to stop it."
On October 24, Paulus received an email from SiteGround warning that she had used 80% of her allocated CPU resources. Her four websites share a single hosting plan supported by the Bulgaria-headquartered company. Paulus said that when she checked her website's security dashboard the following Monday, she saw requests arriving several times a second. She said the visitor identified itself as "Meta External Agent," a fact later backed up by operators at SiteGround.
According to Meta's developers webpage, a Meta External Agent "crawls the web for use cases such as training foundation AI models or improving products by indexing content directly." Paulus said she occasionally runs Meta ads and had seen Facebook bots visit before, but the number of hits was new.
Paulus said she edited her robots.txt file and put up a firewall, but those can take 24 hours to take effect, so she contacted her host. "They gave me some code to add to a hidden file on my website," she said. "This hidden file is not something that anybody who's a normal person running a website would want to touch, but that's the only way that we could stop the bots."
The fix was temporary. By mid-week, Paulus said another Meta bot named "Meta Web Indexer" arrived, pushing her hosting resource usage to 100%. Meta's developer guide defines a Meta Web Indexer as a crawler that "navigates the web to improve Meta AI search result quality for users."
A Meta spokesperson told Business Insider on Monday that website managers control bot activity and referred to its "Meta Web Crawlers Developer Documentation" page. "Like many companies, Meta uses web crawlers for a number of different purposes, and website managers can decide how our crawlers interact with their sites through tools like robots.txt," the spokesperson said. "We provide publicly available guidance on ways to manage robots.txt for our crawlers, and we respect the preferences site owners set." SiteGround did not respond to a request for comment. According to a screenshot email exchange between SiteGround and Paulus, the company said its "server-side protection" is already limiting these bot attempts.
As of Monday, Paulus said her website was still struggling. She had to remove the webpage link from her Instagram profile to prevent additional human clicks that could take the site offline entirely. Paulus said she does not have the means to pay to increase the traffic allowance because bots are not customers and do not generate additional income. There are no laws that prevent an AI bot from crawling a publicly accessible website, she said. She said she is also exploring Cloudflare's human verification tools to stop bots from reaching her site, a tool that is free to use at the moment.
"Meta needs to have guardrails in place to prevent this from happening," Paulus said. "Imagine if the unregulated AI keeps doing this, how long can platforms like Cloudflare continue to offer free services?" She added, "If this keeps happening, I would assume that small businesses are going to fork out more, either for higher usage or for programs to better protect themselves."