Some of you may have noticed a few outages on this website during February 2026 – being presented with a ‘bandwidth exceeded’ message. You have my apologies – but I blame ChatGPT.
I’ve been using Registar as my hosting provider for many years, across a number of websites. There’s a bandwidth limit (that is, the amount of traffic they will allow to/from the site over a given period), and until this month, there has never been an issue with this; I don’t know what the limit is, but I’ve never reached it.
But then a week or so ago, I got a message informing me that enablenowexpert.com was unreachable because I’d exceeded this bandwidth limit. So I asked Registar to increase it – which they did, at no extra cost (thank you!). But then two days later, the same thing happened. Again, I asked for the bandwidth limit to be increased – which, again, they did. That lasted a couple more days, then the same thing. Clearly something was going on – this is not that much of a popular a site – so I logged on to cPanel to see what was going on, and saw that the vast majority of traffic was in accesses by GPTBot. This is the Chat GPT crawler, which is clearly trawling my site, and pulling my content to use to train its own AI models.
This should come as no surprise to me, really, as a client I’ve been doing some work for told me that whenever he asks AI for information about SAP Enable Now, this site, and my YouTube channel, feature heavily as sources of the provided information.
I guess I should be flattered, but I really can’t have an automated bot bringing down my site every couple of days. GPTBot has been consuming massively more bandwidth than the next biggest bot – and increasing its hits exponentially. If it continues at this rate, I’d probably have to upgrade my hosting plan to the next tier, at which point I’m literally paying just to allow a bot to steal my intellectual property.
So I made the decision to just block GPTBot from being able to access my site altogether (which is why it shows the last visit as being 2 days ago, in the table above). This means I’ll lose a reasonable amount of exposure, but what else can I do?
If you’re wondering what it can possibly be finding of interest here, when this site seems to be just a relatively small collection of blog posts, I also host the Enable Now Wiki on this domain (under enablenowexpert.com/wiki, or enablenow.wiki) and that has much more information on it – with pretty much one page per setting or property in SAP Enable Now. And that’s most of what GPTBot is pulling, according to the web logs.
So if you’re looking for information on SAP Enable Now, instead of using ChatGPT try visiting any of my SAP Enable Now related websites directly. Otherwise, just bear in mind that whatChatGPT serves up may not be the full picture – and I’m sure mine is not the only site blocking it.
Incidentally, if you’re having similar problems with your own side and are wondering how to block ChatGPT, It’s just a matter of adding the following code to a robots.txt file in the site’s content root:
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /You’re welcome.
