How Film Industry Data Website The-Numbers.com got Mauled by Bots
How Film Industry Data Website The-Numbers.com Got Mauled By Bots No comments by: Maya Posch July 25, 2026 Title: Copy Short Link: Copy A lot has been made about the increase of automated traffic on the Internet, with the past years LLM-related crawlers having quite literally swarmed the picture here. Not only does this drive up traffic, it also increases load on web servers, whose owners find themselves faced with increased hosting costs. This recently led to The-Numbers.com going offline for a while as automated traffic was quite literally destroying their bottom line.
- ▪How Film Industry Data Website The-Numbers.com Got Mauled By Bots No comments by: Maya Posch July 25, 2026 Title: Copy Short Link: Copy A lot has been made about the increase of automated traffic on the Internet, with the past years LLM-rel
- ▪Not only does this drive up traffic, it also increases load on web servers, whose owners find themselves faced with increased hosting costs.
- ▪This recently led to The-Numbers.com going offline for a while as automated traffic was quite literally destroying their bottom line.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hackaday |
| Canonical URL | https://hackaday.com/2026/07/25/how-film-industry-data-website-the-numbers-com-got-mauled-by-bots/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 26 Jul 2026 05:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T05:02:48.233Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T05:02:48.233Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 96QfZjmfnR4V |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
How Film Industry Data Website The-Numbers.com Got Mauled By Bots No comments by: Maya Posch July 25, 2026 Title: Copy Short Link: Copy A lot has been made about the increase of automated traffic on the Internet, with the past years LLM-related crawlers having quite literally swarmed the picture here. Not only does this drive up traffic, it also increases load on web servers, whose owners find themselves faced with increased hosting costs. This recently led to The-Numbers.com going offline for a while as automated traffic was quite literally destroying their bottom line. This saga is covered by [Stephen Follows], who had a chance to talk with the founder and CEO of the site, [Bruce Nash], after the site went basically offline for a few months.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hackaday.
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