Podcast Analytics Inflated by Amazon bot

hi @distinctseo,

Podcast directories continuously crawl the RSS feed looking for changes to ingest, such as new episodes, so you don’t necessarily want to block the crawlers/bots that are doing this, however, they shouldn’t be downloading the episode files in a way that triggers a listen/download. If episode downloads are occuring, then there is something else at play here (maybe scraping content for AI?). If you have a web control panel, such as cPanel, you can try looking in your raw access logs and check the user agent behind the file get requests, or possibly reach out to your webhosts support team to see if they can check for you. It may be safe for them to block.

I have done the raw access check to logs and that’s why I pinpointed Amazon. Which isn’t correct now that I think of it. The bots are coming from AWS. That much is certain. And the scraping for AI makes a lot of sense. For about six months the first of the month was recording huge downloads and that was corroborated by huge bandwidth demands at the server level….