How Film Industry Data Website The-Numbers.com got Mauled by Bots

The-Numbers.com, a film industry data site running since nineteen ninety-seven, went dark for months this year — not hacked, not bankrupt, but simply overwhelmed. Hackaday reports that LLM crawlers and bots from prediction markets like Polymarket were making so many requests that the server bills spiraled out of control. Founder Bruce Nash said scraper bots first arrived around twenty twenty-four, then a much larger wave hit in December twenty twenty-five. The site tried blocking automated traffic, but the architecture built for human visitors couldn't cope. Fortunately, their commercial data licensing kept them afloat — but they've had to rebuild the entire infrastructure. It's a sign of a broader problem: AI and LLM crawlers now generate logarithmically more traffic than traditional search engines, leaving many sites scrambling to figure out how to survive the bot invasion.

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