Hobby plan suspended due to aggressive GPTBot crawling

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1

Hello Vercel Community Support,

My Hobby plan was suspended on Feb 4st 2026 because of exceeding limits on the free-tier (requests, bandwidth, etc.). After investigating the logs, I found that the usage was entirely consumed by an aggressive surge from GPTBot.

I have already taken comprehensive measures to prevent this from recurring and to ensure my site complies with Vercel’s best practices for bot mitigation. Here is what I’ve implemented:

On Vercel Side:

  1. Enabled Native AI Bots Protection: I have turned on the “AI Bots” toggle under Project Settings > Security to block known AI crawlers at the edge.

  2. Custom Firewall Rules: Added manual WAF rules to specifically block GPTBot and other aggressive user-agents.

On Cloudflare Side (DNS/Proxy):

  1. AI Crawler Blocking: Enabled “Block AI bots from accessing your site” under Cloudflare’s AI Audit settings.

  2. Bot Fight Mode: Activated “Bot Fight Mode” to challenge any unidentified or headless automated scripts.

Since my hobby projects are paused at the moment, what else I can do to recover my project? Any help to resolve this issue?

Thanks in advance!

4

Hey! I’ve unblocked you for the next 30 days, can you make sure you review Fair use Guidelines so this doesn’t happen again?

6

Hi,

Thanks for the quick response and for unblocking my account!

I’ve read through the Fair Use Guidelines and my projects are in full compliance. I also want to update you that since applying the new bot-blocking measures, my project’s usage has already dropped back to normal levels.

It is now clear that the previous spike was a one-time surge from GPTBot, and the current traffic is well within the Hobby plan’s expected range. I’ll make sure to monitor it consistently moving forward.

Thanks again!