- TheNumbers.com, a trusted film data site, vanished in March 2026 after being overwhelmed by AI bot traffic and a likely security breach involving prediction market manipulation.
- Founder Bruce Nash revealed that only 10% of traffic was human, with the rest from AI crawlers and agentic bots, forcing the team to spend 90% of their time on site maintenance.
- The site was taken down by a combination of industrial-scale scraping and targeted hacking, possibly to gain early access to box office data for prediction markets like Polymarket.
- Nash rebuilt a bare-bones site from scratch, unable to restore the old 30-year-old infrastructure, and is now rethinking how to serve multiple audiences (humans, search engines, AI models, etc.).
- The incident highlights the fragility of the open web, where small sites face unsustainable costs and attacks from AI bots, with examples like iFixit, Read the Docs, and ZEGO suffering similar fates.
- AI tools have lowered the barrier for cyberattacks, making it easy for anyone with a cheap subscription to probe legacy systems and exploit vulnerabilities.