[▲ Vercel Community](/) · [Categories](/categories) · [Latest](/latest) · [Top](/top) · [Live](/live)

[Help](/c/help/9)

# Unexpected spike in Vercel Edge Requests without traffic increase

82 views · 1 like · 3 posts


Jonoki67 4086 (@jonoki67-4086) · 2026-02-16

## Problem
My website’s `Edge Requests` has suddenly gone through the roof in the last 6 days, with no visible change in traffic.

## What I've Tried
I have implemented:
- Caching
- Bot blocking
- `ISR` (Incremental Static Regeneration)

And nothing has worked. As a free tier user, I got an email saying that my project will be paused if `Edge Requests` exceed 1 million.

![Screenshot 2026-02-16 153344](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/vercel/original/3X/5/6/56432aa9ee4d278eb6bb2d7d68e94818fd34a189.jpeg)

## Questions
What could possibly be causing this sudden surge? And how do I fix it?


Jacob Paris (@jacobparis) · 2026-02-16 · ♥ 1

The requests are all coming from `gptbot`, which is the official ChatGPT crawler. It is unfortunately pretty heavy in its crawling and we're looking at solutions to prevent this from taking down Hobby projects

If you block gptbot from your Firewall tab this will go away, however you also won't show up in ChatGPT searches, so you'll have to make a judgement call appropriate to your project

if you go to Observability -> Edge Requests -> Bot name you can see the identifier


Jonoki67 4086 (@jonoki67-4086) · 2026-02-17

Thank you! Blocking GPTBot via the firewall stopped the problem. I cannot thank you enough.