Crawl Budget
CONCEPT
SEARCH OPTIMIZATION
Crawl budget combines Googlebot's crawl capacity limit and crawl demand; it matters mainly for very large or fast-changing sites with many URLs.
CONCEPT
CYBERSECURITY
Excessive Agency
An AI-system vulnerability in which excessive functionality, permissions or autonomy enable damaging actions from erroneous or manipulated outputs.
BUSINESS RELEVANCE
As AI agents get access to email, files, payments and business systems, excessive agency can turn one wrong or manipulated output into a real business action, such as sending data or deleting records.
IMPLEMENTATION EXAMPLE
A support agent built on an LLM is given read-only access to order data, a refund tool limited to $100, and a rule that refunds above that amount or account deletions need human approval, with all tool calls logged.
LIMITATIONS
Prompt instructions alone do not limit agency; controls must be enforced in permissions and code. Tight limits can reduce usefulness, and human approval steps lose value if reviewers approve requests without checking them.
TECHNICAL EXPLANATION
OWASP describes three root causes: excessive functionality, where an agent has tools it does not need; excessive permissions, where tools have more access than required; and excessive autonomy, where high-impact actions run without independent checks. Mitigations include least privilege, narrow tools, user-scoped credentials, human approval for sensitive actions, rate limits and monitoring.
Secondary Topics
AI Governance, Intelligent Automation
Sources
OWASP Gen AI Security Project — LLM06:2025 Excessive Agency — https://genai.owasp.org/llmrisk/llm062025-excessive-agency/; OWASP Gen AI Security Project — Agentic AI Threats and Mitigations — https://genai.owasp.org/resource/agentic-ai-threats-and-mitigations/
Related terms
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
CONCEPT
CYBERSECURITY
Attacks that use botnets to overwhelm servers or networks with traffic, and the layered defenses that absorb, filter and rate-limit the malicious requests.
Keyword Cannibalization
CONCEPT
SEARCH OPTIMIZATION
An SEO issue where several pages on one site serve the same search intent, blurring which URL should rank and splitting internal signals.
Idempotency
CONCEPT
SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE
A software design property ensuring that repeating an operation, such as an API request, has the same intended effect as running it once.
Embeddings
CONCEPT
INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION
Embeddings convert words, documents or images into lists of numbers that capture meaning, enabling semantic search, clustering, recommendations and RAG.