It seems that ask.com's bot is in love with two of our sites. The past two day have been especially silly. One site received 11k visits yesterday and today one is just off the 13k mark. I have no idea what they are doing with all of that info as we rarely receive any traffic from them. Funny thing is, these are "newer" sites.
Have you emailed them to ask if there's a reason why they're crawling you so much? It might be that you've got a loop in your site that they're following or a bug in their crawler. Either way they'd probably appreciate knowing about the problem.
this is across multiple sites. The pages they are requesting are all different. Not sure there is anything "wrong" other than the fact that they are grabbing an insane number of pages
Well, if it's a well-behaved bot it shouldn't be grabbing an insane number of pages, unless it's leaving a reasonable gap (say two seconds) between each request.