You may find that your site shows this on the first page load for new visitors:
AI bots have, unfortunately, been absolutely hammering some sites scraping them for their data with no regard for throttling. Essentially they are performing distributed denial of service [DDoS] attacks on sites to steal their contents for their models. There are good bots that identify themselves as an AI bot and that makes blocking them painless, however, many of the AI bots are doing their best to look like legitimate users.
Due to a large number of customers experiencing performance issues with their sites due to this we have created our anti-bot protection that, for now, does a pretty good job of stopping them in their tracks. The downside is that new visitors to your site may very briefly see the above message, "Please wait while we verify you're not a bot..." This message should only show for somewhere between 0.1 and 0.5 seconds in most cases and in extreme cases 1.5 to 2 seconds - generally on lower-power and very old devices.
If you are seeing this message this means that we identified your account as having come under attack from AI bots. If you wish to verify this you can generally log into your cPanel and go to "Resource Usage" and then "Current Usage" to see graphs like this:
Depending on how long ago the protection was put in place, you may need to adjust the graph to see the last week or month of usage. That said this image is an example of a situation where the bot protection would be put in place. And this graph shows what it looks like when the protection is handling the issue [notice the lack of faults and the lower usage on the right hand side]:
We have specifically engineered this protection not to interfere with the normal operation of your websites beyond the initial anti-bot verification; however, if you are having issues, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. In the event that you do not wish to have this protection, we can disable it for your account.
