An artist says Meta’s bots overwhelmed her website and left her scrambling to protect her business

A San Diego-based artist wanted more people to visit her website.

Instead, she said she got more than 550,000 hits from a Meta bot and is scrambling to keep her business online.

Chelsea Paulus, a children’s author and illustrator, told Business Insider that an automated visitor overwhelmed her website’s hosting resources, forcing her to troubleshoot the problem with her hosting provider.

“This has never happened before,” Paulus said. "It has been an incredibly stressful week, even with some of my technical knowledge to handle it."

Paulus said she's operated her business for a decade and became a full-time artist last year. Before that, she worked in tech and web design, so she said she quickly realized something was wrong when the website 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."

The fight to keep the webpage running

On October 24, Paulus received an email from her hosting provider, SiteGround, warning that she had used 80% of her allocated CPU resources. Paulus's 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.

"I went to WordFence, and then I saw the continuous lines that kept popping up every second," Paulus said. "In WordFence, you can click on the details so you can see the IP address. I looked it up, and that IP address is from a Meta location in Dallas."

She said the visitor identified itself as “Meta External Agent,” a fact later backed up by operators at SiteGround, her website host.

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 this number of hits was something entirely new.

"I edited my robots.txt file, and I put up a firewall, but those can also take 24 hours to take effect, and I needed to stop the bots immediately," Paulus said. "So I contacted my host."

"They gave me some code to add to a hidden file on my website," she added. "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."

The search for answers continues

A Meta spokesperson told Business Insider on Monday that website managers control bot activity and referred to its "Meta Web Crawlers Developer Documentation" page for details on how each bot is used.

"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," a Meta 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 comments.

According to a screenshot email exchange between SiteGround and Paulus, the company said that its "server-side protection" is already limiting these bot attempts.

As of Monday, Paulus said her website is still struggling. She had to remove the webpage link from her Instagram profile to prevent the additional human clicks that could take the site offline entirely.

Paulus said she doesn't have the means to pay to increase the traffic allowance for her site 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 is also exploring Cloudflare's human verification tools to stop bots from reaching her site. The tool 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."