Blog Spike

[Unlucky General]

Comrades,

This is a question for my fellow Bloggers out there. I've been running several blogs for over ten years with a modest following. My main blog (Unlucky General) has 127 followers and 385 posts. It normally gets about 3-4000 hits per month. Like I say, a modest following.

Over the last two months the hit count has spiked massively. I'm not getting any comments and due to my offshore deployment, I haven't posted anything new since April. I've not promoted anything on this forum or Facebook in ages to increase traffic. My hits last month were 19,791 (so a five-fold increase) and at the time of this posting, the current monthly tally is greater still at 33,557.

Is anyone else experiencing this and does anyone have an idea what's going on? I'm not complaining but it would be nice to know all the same.

Thanks for any help.

[Mikai]

Bots crawling through your blog to train AI.

[robh]

Bots crawling through your blog to train AI.

Yep, everything you have ever written is now the property of Meta and Google. If you were monetised (via ads or clicks) you aren't anymore.

[Tactalvanic]

Bots crawling through your blog to train AI.

Another +1 to that, and with the sudden billions being chucked in UK direction by the big boys to "invest" in UK AI more, etc, then expect more of it.
Your free Artificial brain feed. hmmmmm brainsssss.

I really do understand its can be a useful thing, in the right places.

sadly it looks like we still have a few more years of techies pocking their AI sticks into everything they can stick them in, until they have nothing left to stick them in, and finally will know the specific things they will be using it to make money from, until... the next gen thing comes along that they can stick in things.

[Khusru2]

Mine is the same. A large increase. I've read a couple of blogs reporting the same.
I hope the AI grieves for me when I'm gone as it won't get updates.

[BeneathALeadMountain]

Even my very stalled blog has seen it! The last person to look at it properly was probably Khusru2  - apologies I hadn’t seen your comment: thank you for your kind words and taking the time (and yes the Monument ProAcryl paint and glaze & wash together is almost cheating when it comes to painting white!). I’m going to forget this thread and pretend it’s real people being interested in my nonsense to force myself to start posting again. 

Andrew
BeneathALeadMountain

[Warren Abox]

Same here, to which I'll add: I finally disabled all comments on my blog because the AI spambots got to be clever enough to bypass the blockers, but not clever enough to post anything worth reading.

All the conversations that the blog spawns these days are held on Elon's House of Gentlemanly Discourse, the ephemeral nature of which pales in comparison to the longer lifespan of a comment section.  C'est la guerre!

[Unlucky General]

Thanks everyone and that certainly explains it. Thankfully I am not interested in making money off my hobby so monetization isn't an issue for me.

I'd better be sure of my facts when I post things (I generally am) because I'd hate for misinformation to be hoovered up by AI and regurgitated across the web as fact. Then again, I suppose people have been doing that for years.

On a similar note, when I'm typing a post these days I get this pop-up notification telling me, "10 Google Search entities found. Insert the links into your post?" Is anyone doing this? I'm ignoring it for the time being and I don't really know what it's telling me.

[Rick]

I wouldn't worry too much about causing misinformation in an AI system - between the inbuilt bias of the initial programming and the selective data they use to train them, they are full of bias and misinformation - AI 'information' simply cannot be trusted.

[boneio]

I wouldn't worry too much about causing misinformation in an AI system - between the inbuilt bias of the initial programming and the selective data they use to train them, they are full of bias and misinformation - AI 'information' simply cannot be trusted.

^^^^^ this. If you actually engage one of the chatbots on a complex topic that only has a few publicly available articles on the internet (like, say, Catherine of Burgundy), it's laughable how transparent and devoid of 'reasoning' its responses are. It's really always easier to just go read the source yourself and form a human opinion. I despair for anyone who trusts AI summaries etc.

Anyway, more on topic, yes there's been a large spike in traffic in general, managing such things is part of my job and a lot of traffic is coming from previously quiet countries which are certainly irrelevant to the mostly UK-retailers I look after. They're certainly not selling anything to the 15% or more of traffic coming from Brazil, for example... blocked!

[OB]

Mine too. It is crawling bots. Huge leaps in numbers. Most of mine lately have been USA. I do have a USA readership but not in the thousands per day.

[pixelgeek]

On a similar note, when I'm typing a post these days I get this pop-up notification telling me, "10 Google Search entities found. Insert the links into your post?" Is anyone doing this? I'm ignoring it for the time being and I don't really know what it's telling me.

You can ignore it. Blogger is trying to insert SEO entities into the post to help its own search engine quantify your content. Sadly there isn't any way to disable the "feature".

[Sunjester]

I've seen a similar thing over the past couple of weeks, a massive increase in visits to my blog.

[Phil Robinson]

A general surge it appears. I wonder if the post title encourages more bot hits? Mine went through the roof more when I posted Bring Up The Guns

[Norm]

I think subject does make a difference. I had a set of rules that had the name of a city in the title, each time I posted and used that title, I got extra traffic.

Also, when you get a spike, if you go into your stats and see which country the extra hits are coming from, they are generally not from the usual top eight.