> Something suspiciously absent from this article is addressing whether some of these are in fact human visitors, but humans issuing chatgpt or similar queries instead of going directly.

That's not absent from the article, it's right there in the section titled "The Claude ratio". ChatGPT, Claude, etc. use different user-agents for scraping vs user-initiated requests, and the author notes that user-initiated requests were an absolutely miniscule fraction of the total traffic.

Oh, that's what "Anthropic's search crawler, had requested 420,680 pages in one week. That same week, Claude sent me 12 human visitors" meant?

Yeah, googling it does seem like "Claude-User" is for user-initiated requests.

By "Claude sent me" I thought the author meant referer header in real browser requests showed that they came from.

I mean, that's what the section "Pages crawled per visitor referred" refers to, right?