GPTBot is hammering your API. Block it, or charge it?

Check your logs for last month. Filter user-agents for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, bingbot. For most SaaS apps and content APIs in 2026 that's now a real percentage of total requests — traffic you pay to serve, from callers who never convert, never see an ad, never subscribe.

The reflex is robots.txt or a blocklist. Three problems:

Blocking is leaky. Polite bots honor robots.txt; the traffic that costs you most doesn't announce itself.

Blocking is blunt. Some agent traffic is your future distribution — an AI assistant citing your data to a user who becomes a customer.

Blocking earns $0. The traffic has value to the caller. Blocked value is just destroyed, not captured.