[JohnTHaller]

If you're in any way semi-popular and a decent size, you're gonna get hammered. PortableApps.com was partially offline for weeks due to China-based AI scrapers. You block the useragent, they start hitting you with another one from the same IP in the same way. You block the IP, they switch to another. You block the subnet, they use another. At one point it was nearly a thousand different IPs from around China hammering away. For all intents and purposes, a DDoS. This wasn't a little "extra load", this was load that was thousands of times beyond what our legitimate userbase was using.

And if you're thinking about blocking all of China, while this particular AI bot didn't use them, a bunch of other ones I've encountered use VPNs and hacked clients worldwide.