My blog is getting overwhelmed by bots since mid-August 2025. My posts generally get around 200 views each depending on the topic. Sometimes as high as 500. However, my posts have been getting 5,000 or more views with the most recent post getting 10,500 views.
Now I'd like to think that my blog is very popular, but I know that this is garbage traffic and it has made the view counter useless. I am really surprised that Google, the owner of the Blogger app, doesn't have a fix for this. There should be one of those "I am not a robot" boxes that need to be checked before entry into my blog.
I have tried to hook up with Cloudflare, but I get nothing but "page will not load, try again" responses when I tried to sign up for this service.
Needless to say, this is all very discouraging and I don't really know what to do about it. I don't know if I should keep on posting new content or just give up and post nothing at all. Or maybe I set up a Facebook Group to serve as my blog.
I don't know, any suggestions?
Another problem: now blogger won't allow me to upload pictures onto my blog. I have to click and drag from my iPhotos app and drop the picture into my blog. This works ok, but it is a bit clunky to do.
This seems to he happening to many (all?) Blogs, Jim....ii have certainly seen the same thing and have read at least two other similar posts in the last week or so.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't really worry me unduly because I have only ever been interested in a comments count, I never worried about views anyway.
It would be a shame if you stopped blogging but it's up to you on what you are trying to "get" out of the whole process...personally I would not move to FB and any blog that goes there, I won't see any longer!
I agree with Keith. It is page views that count but reader engagement though comments that I measure..
DeleteThis phenomenon seems to be widespread. A rule-of-thumb seems to be that where previous ‘hits’ were x, the current level seems to be 3x or more.
ReplyDeleteHopefully, it will be a passing phase.
Good luck,
Bob
One wonders what is the purpose of bot meddling in this way. IS there a purpose? Or just cyber-vandalism?
ReplyDeleteThat readers set more store by comments received than 'hit' numbers is to me something of a revelation. I tended to accord the equal weight. These days I find myself commenting a deal less on others' blogs than formerly, mainly because I don't have anything new to say! I might have to rethink this, but I don't want to comment just for the sake of commenting.
ReplyDeleteCheers,
Ion
...agreed - comments are lovely to get and I reply to every one (though it isn't my main driver for blogging) but the reader count has always been suspect... BOTS have been crawling blogger for years and years... in my case they've managed to rack up the highest reader count on a post since I started 14 years ago (!) with one I posted a few weeks ago, 14K views and I normally get 200.. :o)))
DeleteI'd like to echo the comments above - it is a really widespread thing at the moment. I've no idea why it is happening, why now, and why hobby blogs. Maybe a solution is to post and open comments on specific days and close the comments door otherwise. Not an ideal response but...
ReplyDeleteIf the bots are not interferring with the blog or comments I would ignore it. Your core readers won't be affected they will still be reading. And like rross I wouldn't see it if it went to FB.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't worry about page views Jim. The bots always seem to have been there, maybe AI has increased the number?
ReplyDeleteYou have 600 followers, which is a lot, so I think that your blog is appreciated, I certainly appreciate all the effort you must put into posting.
It is up to you of course but I would also not follow you to Facebook as I find it difficult to find anything amongst the FB feeds of suggested content plus it seems to be filled with scam ads.
Search engines of old used to do much the same thing (they probably still do). It doesnt overly bother me, after all I'm not paying for the server capacity to publish to the data mining bots.
ReplyDeleteAs other people have noted, I put more store by comments, and the number of spam comments have gone down a lot lately. So I guess blogger must be doing something right. Blogger does have periods where it seems to struggle with photo uploads, most annoying is when it puts them in the wrong order.
I've always had the odd spike in visits due (presumably) to bots but, l like everyone else,these have dramatically increased. AI scraping websites maybe??
ReplyDeleteYou need a robots.txt in your website-folder. Guidelines for bots:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cloudflare.com/learning/bots/what-is-robots-txt/
It's the AI/LLM scrapers. Which are ignoring robot instructions in many/most cases. They are not good actors in general.
DeleteI seldom look at traffic for my Blog but did after reading your (and others) note about recent increase and yes indeed a large surge in search activity from Asia but no actual effect on Blog that I can discern. FB not immune to such issues either and its search function is rather dire. Hope you stay on Blogger tis best of a bad lot maybe :-)
ReplyDeleteI suspect the increase in bot traffic is driven by AI. I've always enjoyed your blog, but I'm afraid I only tend to comment on forums. I'll be sad never to see your bloggings again if you do move to Facebook.
ReplyDeleteHmm I better take a look at my blog hit counter. While it is nice to hit milestone numbers it would be nice to think any increases are because I have posted engaging content!
ReplyDeleteIs it likely this is info-scraping by LLMs? I have read that any number of businesses and information providers find that forms the bulk of their traffic, and its causing issues globally.
ReplyDeleteI only recently stated blogging again after almost a two year hiatus and was shocked by the number of page views being generated. I agree only the comments count. I am a long time reader of your blog and would like to see it remain here.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds as though this is the AI models attempting to scrape data to learn. It's actually been quite devastating to smaller providers that can be hurt by denial of service attacks....which is functionally what these things are doing.
ReplyDelete