Is all bot traffic bad for ecommerce?
No. Search crawlers and AI answer engines can drive discovery. The task is distinguishing beneficial automation from harmful automation - and now, deciding your policy on AI crawlers explicitly.
Benign automation includes search engine crawlers, which bring organic traffic, and monitoring services. A newer category is AI crawlers from answer engines and model providers: they read your catalog to power shopping answers, which can send qualified visitors - or simply consume bandwidth and harvest pricing.
The mature posture is a policy, not a blanket block: allow crawlers that send value, block the ones that take it, and measure both. That requires visibility into which automated agents hit your storefront and what they access.