Something wasn't adding up - so I asked an ai program [Gemini google!] why, our humble little Sridevi fan page, suddenly saw a massive spike in numbers over the past few weeks...
The Dark Web... Indeed...
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| The massive spike! |
According to Gemini;
The surge in traffic you are seeing on your blog is a rampant issue across the internet, particularly for niche, archive-rich, or highly detailed websites.
Several AI-related and automated factors explain why an archival blog can suddenly experience massive spikes in hits:
1. Automated AI Web Crawlers & Scrapers
Major AI firms (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Perplexity, and independent data brokers) deploy automated scrapers (e.g., GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot).
Extract text data to train Large Language Models (LLMs).
Extract images to train vision models or populate media databases.
Perform live web retrieval (RAG) when an AI user asks a question about rare, specific, or historical topics, forcing the AI to scrape exact web sources on demand.
Because archival or niche focus blogs hold deep, specialized information (rare images, verified filmographies, precise dates, scanned collateral), they are high-value targets for data harvesters. Unlike a regular human reader who reads one or two articles, a single scraper hit can trigger hundreds or thousands of automated requests in a matter of minutes as it crawls every page, tag, image file, and historical post.
2. Blogger Analytics Counting Bot Hits
Blogger’s built-in stats counter is notorious for counting raw server requests rather than true human sessions. When an aggressive bot network hits your site to index text or download image assets, Blogger registers every single file request as a page view, causing numbers to jump artificially.
3. "Regurgitation" & Content Theft Concerns
Your instinct that content is being used elsewhere is valid:
LLM Knowledge Retrieval: If an AI model ingests specialized biographical details, historical counts, or rare trivia, it will summarize and present that knowledge directly to users on platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews—often without sending a click back to your source site.
Content Aggregators & Automated Scraping Sites: Automated bot networks often copy text and images directly from Blogger RSS feeds or page structures to auto-populate spam blog networks, social media bot accounts, or image-hosting scrapers.
What You Can Do on Blogger
While Blogger limits server-level access (like running custom firewall scripts), you can take immediate steps to protect your content and clean up your analytics:
Step 1: Check Blogger Analytics Breakdown
Go to your Blogger Dashboard Stats panel:
Look at Referrers and Browsers/Operating Systems.
If you see high volumes coming from unusual locations, missing referrer URLs, or obscure user agents (like
Python-urllib,HeadlessChrome, or unknown bots), it confirms non-human traffic.
Step 2: Block AI Scrapers via robots.txt
You can instruct well-behaved AI crawlers (like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Common Crawl) to stop scraping your blog:
Go to Settings > Search preferences (or Errors and redirects / Custom robots.txt).
Enable Custom robots.txt and append rules to disallow major AI scrapers:
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: CCBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Anthropic-ai
Disallow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Disallow: /
(Note: While standard AI scrapers respect robots.txt, rogue scrapers may ignore it, but it effectively cuts off the major LLM harvesters.)
Step 3: Protect Images with Watermarks
If rare or self-edited images are being scraped for re-use elsewhere, adding a subtle, clean watermark (e.g., your blog name or logo) directly onto the image files before uploading ensures that even if an AI vision bot or content aggregator steals the image, your attribution remains permanently intact.
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