Weird part #1 is that the traffic isn't for the most part shaped like crawler traffic. It's incredibly bursty, and heavily redundant, missing even the most obvious low hanging fruit optimizations.
Could be someone is using residential proxies to wrap AI agents' web traffic, but even so, there's a lot of pieces that don't really make sense, like why the traffic pattern is like being hit by a shotgun. It isn't just one request, but anywhere between 40 and 100 redundant requests.
A popular theory is that this is because of sloppy coding, AI companies are too rich to care, but then again that doesn't really add up. This isn't just a minor inefficiency, if it is "just" bad coding, they stand to gain monumental efficiency improvements by fixing the issues, in the sense of getting the data much faster, a clear competitive edge.
Really weird.
My unsubstantiated guess is the residential proxy/botnet is very unreliable, and that's why they fire so many request. Makes sense if it's sold as a service.