What can I do to stop a persistent bot from hammering my site?
Sorry if this isn't the right forum, but I'm hoping someone can help. I run a small blog. It's been going for 12+ years. I'm not at the top of SERPs. I write long, complex content. It's niche.
I signal or block AI crawlers and known scrapers where I can. Now there's a particular automated service that has started hammering the site. At first it was a single page view here and there (one url each time, no event or timers fired).
For the past few days it's become the same url "visited" up to 30 times an hour. Every one of those repeat visits has a different URL. The UA is always Chrome/145 with a Google referrer and 800*600 browser. Because it "acts" human, it ends up in analytics, which are now a mess.
I managed to challenge on UA for a day or so in Cloudflare but it's getting through again. Meanwhile, real human users have to navigate CF challenge screens, which isn't ideal.
Is there anything else I can try?
Edited to add: Thanks all for the suggestions. I've spent some time working through these today, and it's been a useful experience. Those who said to filter out of analytics: I think this is the way. My other realization is that my "human" traffic has plummeted, possibly as a result of the Google search update, so I need to change what I use analytics for - or if I use it at all. It's not great news as a site owner and long form writer, but it is what it is!