Case Study: CrunchBase cuts pageviews in half and stabilizes its site by blocking bots with Distil Networks

CrunchBase Cuts Pageviews in Half by Blocking Bots with No Impact on Legitimate Users

CrunchBase, a leading platform for discovering companies and people, was experiencing random traffic spikes and repeated brownouts after launching its 2.0 site. Aggressive, sophisticated bots were crawling long‑tail pages, overwhelming DevOps, stealing content and threatening ad delivery and the company’s long‑term licensing model — and CrunchBase lacked the visibility, tools and staff to stop them without risking legitimate user traffic.

CrunchBase deployed Distil Networks’ Cloud CDN to detect and block malicious bots inline with minimal operational changes. The service stabilized infrastructure by turning load into well‑shaped, purely human traffic, cut pageviews roughly in half without affecting users or ad deliveries, blocked 99.9% of bad bots, protected user‑generated content and even generated nearly 1,000 commercial licensing leads.

Crunchbase

Kurt Freytag

Head of Product & Engineering