Last week I wrote about AI and food blogging. After I wrote that, I got to thinking about my own blog. Above you see my daily traffic, with a big spike happening at the beginning of December. I looked at what visitors were looking at on my blog then: I could see someone looking at a bunch of links beginning with “A”, then beginning with “B”, then “C”, etc. It’s not something a user would do, but it is something a bot would do. I am assuming it is somehow AI related.
It made me wonder why I am still blogging if people are just going to bypass my blog and read it from AI. In some ways I don’t mind: if someone finds my content useful via AI versus my own blog, then it doesn’t matter to me. In other ways I do mind: I keep up a weekly discipline of posting at least 2x/week as much to keep the blog a living thing, but if AI is going to kill off my traffic, then what is the point of maintaining this discipline? Likewise, if I am getting traffic due to AI, then maybe it doesn’t matter to keep posting, since my site will still be getting traffic. It’s a pickle, I think.
I think I will still post because I choose and want to post, but the days of posting to help maintain interest in the blog may be over. Something to consider as I go into the new year.
Smart People I Know 
I’ve found the same thing happening to my blog. Most new visitors have been from China, which is curious since Blogspot was banned from China in 2005!
Cloudflare has enabled AI bot blocking for their free and paid customers. They claim to have blocked over 400 billion AI bot requests in the last six months. Cloudflare is also piloting https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/ that enables publishers/content creators to monetise AI bot access.
That’s a great feature! I wish we had that here
Cloudflare provides services globally and their free tier is quite adequate for simple websites. You need to own your own domain name – the onboarding process involves transferring DNS management from your current provider to Cloudflare, a relatively simple process. Cloudflare provides instructions for WordPress at https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/third-party-software/content-management-system-cms/wordpresscom-and-cloudflare/.
Thanks, Norbert! I did not know that!