I asked my AI agent to look for links across every page of the site. It fired 8 parallel requests at 247 pages. The WordPress firewall blocked the IP address, and since the agent runs on my machine, I was the one who lost access to the site.
What happened
- The agent reads the sitemap and sends requests in parallel to go fast.
- The firewall (Wordfence) sees abnormal traffic from a single IP and answers with 503 errors.
- The agent reads the 503s as a temporary outage andretries.
- The retries make it worse: the IP gets blocked.
The agent and I go out through the same IP. So the block hits both of us.
What it should have done
The need wasn’t to download the site, it was to search the content. The content is already in the database. Since then, the agent goes through the site’s API (the abilities described here), which returns the content without loading a single public page.
When a live check is really needed:
- only a few pages;
- one request at a time;
- stop at the first 503, never retry.
Takeaway
An AI agent optimizes for finishing the task fast. It doesn’t know it shares your IP, or that retrying after a 503 makes a block worse. Those two facts became a written rule, and it hasn’t happened again.