My website pages are getting 8 to 10x traffic from bots than from genuine users. I'm seeing nearly 90 different bots in my logs. They are all "good bots" by definition. Mostly search engine crawlers, seo indexers like ahrefs and digital ad networks. My problem is the cost. I use Google Maps and Places APIs and am charged a unit cost per API call. I know how to block bots from crawling pages and that is 100% successful for me as is my ability to block them from making chargeable API calls.
The question I have is what is the SEO impact of denying a bot from seeing content provided by the APIs? I am presenting text restaurant location data obtained from Google Places and Yelp Fusion and showing locations on an embedded Google Map.
I'm considering implementing a strategy of allowing only select search engine bots to hit the APIs. Do I need to do this or can I just serve up a generic map image and dummy restaurant location data to bots without SEO penalty? I show a page for each restaurant with the address, city, state, postal code and phone number obtained from Google Places or Yelp Fusion API. Yelp is free but I'll exceed their quota if I fulfill all bot requests.