> The goal of scraping traffic isn't to overwhelm your site, it's to read it once.

If the authors of the scrapers actually cared about it, we wouldn't have this problem in the first place. But today the more appropriate description is: the goal is to scrape as much data as possible as quickly as possible, preferably before your site falls over. They really don't care and side effects beyond that. Search engines have an incentive to leave your site running. AI companies don't. (Maybe apart from perplexity)