I went through a similar process recently. For a while I saw readership of my site gradually increasing, and eventually it became clear that it wasn't human beings.

I also used Claude to help me drill into what's going on. Bizarrely, about 80% of my traffic comes from Singapore, which the author mentioned. I don't know why. A lot of the traffic looks real; it stays for a while, clicks different links in different orders. But no one in Singapore has ever read a thing I've written on my site as far as I'm concerned.

I thought Cloudflare would help protect my site from bots, but it utterly fails. I'm not sure if they're too sophisticated or people overestimate how well CF works for these things. I paid for advanced features for a while and reverted to the free plan once I realized it made no difference. It's a great platform in general, but hasn't been great for allowing me to see how many humans actually read my content.

I know some do because they email me occasionally. If I had to guess, of the ~200 visits per week reported in analytics, around 15 are real.

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robhoeijmakers 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Same ratio roughly. 80% Crawlers and agents, 20% human. Loads of the agents actually serve the content to humans, mostly in ChatGPT.

	▲	steve_adams_86 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Wow, that's a great point... I hadn't considered that. I assumed it's all training. From what I understand, Cloudflare is trying to create a way for agents to consume content in a more structured manner than allowed for attention to the author, and potentially payment along with it. I don't want to be paid but I'd love to see how often context from my writing winds up in a session a human is actively using.