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Witness says surge in AI bot traffic forced emergency changes to congress.gov
Summary
Mr. Rutledge told the House Administration hearing that congress.gov has seen billions of visits and a recent surge in AI/bot traffic — including single-day spikes in June — that caused the site to slow and prompted emergency changes separating public and congressional instances and adding human verification to search.
At a House Administration Committee hearing, a committee member asked Mr. Rutledge about overall traffic to congress.gov and whether the site had recorded about 2,000,000,000 visits.
Mr. Rutledge responded "Much more than 2" and, as recorded in the transcript, referenced a larger human-traffic figure, saying in the exchange that the site saw "2.5... visits to congress.gov just on the human side." The transcript's phrasing around the precise 2.5-billion figure is unclear; Mr. Rutledge repeatedly emphasized that overall human visits are in the billions.
On machine traffic, Mr. Rutledge gave clearer figures: "in April, we got 16,000,000 visits from a AI bot traffic. In May, we got 20,000,000 visits. In 1 day, in the middle of June, June 16 to be exact, we got 22,000,000 in 1 day." He said those spikes "caused our infrastructure to come to a little bit of a grinding halt," prompting emergency changes to the site.
Mr. Rutledge described two immediate mitigations: fully separating the public instance from the congressional instance to address data-ingest issues, and adding a human verification check on search, where he said they found "98% of that traffic was nonhuman." He characterized the traffic as not malicious "in any way, shape, or form," and suggested it came from recreational coders experimenting with AI tools.
The committee member summarized that machine traffic has increased exponentially; Mr. Rutledge confirmed the trend, saying "it's still going up." The transcript does not record a formal vote or additional staff directives in this exchange.
