What actually reads this site

Key findings

• One hour of requests claiming 7 AI crawler names lifted this site's apparent AI crawler share from 3.5% to 16.4%.
• On 22 August 2026, page views from clients claiming AI crawler names were 49.0% of that day's page views. The next day they were 0.5%.
• 0 of 140 requests claiming ChatGPT-User on 22 August 2026 came from OpenAI's published addresses, and all 140 came from a single address.
• Googlebot verified 40 of 40 from 8 addresses on 22 August 2026.
• Excluding 22 August 2026, 50.5% of page requests asked for pages this site never served.
• 84.3% of unrecognised page views claim to be Chrome, and 43.9% of those claim majors released before 2024.
• Google named the search query behind 2 of 245 impressions over the 21 days it had finished revising, which is 0.8%.

Figures cover 11 days to 23 Aug 2026 unless a line names its own window. Cloudflare-derived figures are estimates under sampling.

Without 22 August 2026, 77.5% of page views come from clients I cannot name

11 days of detailed data · to 23 Aug 2026 · sampled, estimates not talliesShare of page views. A page view is a request for a page address answered 2xx or 404, from clients outside Cloudflare's own network, with my own tooling removed first.

Each row splits page views by what the client claimed to be, first without 22 August 2026, then with it, dashed.

One bad hour moves the AI row from 3.5% to 16.4%. I expected the wave to show in the AI row. I did not expect the row to move this far. If you publish an AI-traffic share from user-agent strings alone, one hour like this can move yours just as far. Nobody reading your chart would know.

The same figures are published as JSON and CSV, so you can check any number on this page against them.

The hour that poisoned the chart

11 days of detailed data · to 23 Aug 2026 · sampled, estimates not talliesShare of page views. A page view is a request for a page address answered 2xx or 404, from clients outside Cloudflare's own network, with my own tooling removed first.

On 22 August 2026, 557 requests arrived claiming 7 crawler names that belong to 5 operators, OpenAI, Perplexity, Google, Anthropic and Amazon. 539 of them landed in a single hour. All of them came from one country. 95.0% were answered 404, meaning they asked for pages that do not exist here.

The obvious question is who sent them. On the evidence I keep, spoofing is the near-certain reading and cannot be proven, because proving it needs the IP addresses behind those requests, and I refuse to hold them. No operator named here is accused of anything. The names were the costume, and an operator whose name was worn is the party imitated, not the party acting. If the same hour had landed in your logs, your AI share for the whole month would carry it.

On 22 August 2026, 49.0% of page views came from clients claiming an AI crawler's name. The next day, 0.5%

Each point is the share of that day's page views that came from clients claiming an AI crawler's name.

The line sits in single digits on most days, and on 22 Aug 2026 it reaches 49.0% of that day's page views. One day later it is 0.5%. I keep coming back to that pair. One day that high and the next that low is not a trend. It is one event. A monthly average would keep the lift and hide that it came from one day. That shape is the first thing I would look for in your own daily numbers before trusting any monthly AI figure.

Daily shares on a site this small move a lot day to day, and the figures are estimates under sampling.

One hour multiplied the apparent AI share 4.7 times

Why publish the AI share twice? Because one hour moved it. Any chart that trusts user-agent strings can be moved the same way, in one hour. If you quote only the higher figure from your own logs, you are quoting the hour, not the site.

84.3% of the unrecognised traffic claims to be Chrome, much of it years old

11 days of detailed data · to 23 Aug 2026 · sampled, estimates not talliesClaimed Chrome major versions among unrecognised page views. Each bar's denominator is the Chrome-claiming slice, named beside the chart.

I call this bucket unrecognised because my list did not match it. That is all I know. I cannot tell you these are people, and I will not pretend to.

One bar per claimed Chrome major version, as a share of the unrecognised page views that claim Chrome.

A client claiming Chrome 78, released 22 October 2019, appeared on 11 of 11 observed days.

84.3% of unrecognised page views claim to be Chrome. Of those Chrome claims, 43.9% name major versions released before 2024. Chrome 120 went stable on 5 December 2023 and the next major not until 23 January 2024, so a claim of major 120 or older is a claim of a pre-2024 browser. A real browser years out of date is possible. That much of a site's unknown traffic running one is not what I would expect from people. A Chrome 78 client that shows up on all the observed days settles it for me. If your analytics counts these as visitors, that is the number I would doubt first.

The Chrome 131 bar is dashed because its spike is largely the 22 August 2026 and 23 August 2026 bursts.

Most page requests ask for a page this site never served

11 days of detailed data · to 23 Aug 2026 · sampled, estimates not talliesShare of page requests answered 404, three windows, each named beside its figure.

Each bar is the share of page requests answered 404 in its window, and a 404 counts because this site answers it with a real HTML page.

Without 22 August 2026, half of the requests for a page here ask for one that does not exist. 23 August 2026 carried a second, smaller burst of such requests, so the table also gives the share without both days. Half surprised me. I expected requests for pages that do not exist to be a background hum, not the loudest thing in the log. If your site is small, I would expect yours to look similar. A 404 share this high says more about the requests arriving than about your own broken links.

Most of the 404 numerator comes from unrecognised clients, so this is a claim about request behaviour, never about who is behind it.

Who actually reads the markdown mirror

10 days, without 2026-08-22 · to 23 Aug 2026 · sampled, estimates not talliesShare of markdown mirror fetches by classified client bucket. My own fetches are excluded.

Every page here has a markdown twin at the same address ending in .md, and each bar is one bucket's share of the fetches of those twins.

ClaudeBot is the wrinkle worth naming. In this window the markdown mirror made up 45.7% of its own content fetches, so nearly half of what it took from this site was the mirror, not the HTML. That one I did not see coming. I built the mirror for readers like it and still expected the HTML to win by far more than it did. If you publish a plain-text twin of your pages, the same split in your own logs is what would tell you whether it earned its keep.

Shares describe observed readers, not appetite, because a client that never found the mirror could not have read it, and the AI slice rests on few enough fetches that I hold it at first-signals strength.

I publish a markdown mirror of this page too, at /visibility.md, so a later window can include the readers of the page you are reading now.

Who checks robots.txt before taking content?

10 days, without 2026-08-22 · before the 2026-08-24 policy changeRobots.txt fetches per unit of content taken, both denominators shown for every crawler.

Both columns divide a crawler's robots.txt fetches in this window, first by the HTML pages it took, then by its content fetches with the markdown mirror counted as content.

Applebot, ClaudeBot and OAI-SearchBot fetched robots.txt more often than they took a page, and for 7 of the 13 names no robots.txt fetch was observed in 10 days.

The zeros are the rows I read most carefully. No robots.txt fetch observed in 10 days is not proof of no fetch, because a crawler that read the file once, before the window opened, would look the same here. The ratios are the part you can use, since they say which names check often before taking content from a site like yours.

Every name is self-identified, and etiquette observed is not obedience proven.

Google named the search query behind 2 of 245 impressions

21 days · to 18 Aug 2026 · Google Search ConsoleImpressions whose query Google named, over all impressions, counting only days Google has stopped revising.

Across 21 settled days, Google named the search query behind 2 of 245 impressions, which is 0.8%. The rest are queries Google declined to name. An impression is one appearance of this site in someone's results. A day only counts here once Search Console has stopped revising its figures. That is what I call settled.

The withholding is a known mechanism, not something odd about this site. Ahrefs measured it at 46.77% across the sites it studied, so a site this small sits at the far end of the same mechanism, where almost all of the queries disappear. What I watch is how the share moves, so the table gains a row at each refresh. If your site is small too, the movement in your named share is the part worth keeping, not the level.

First signals, and what I am holding back

First signals are observations too few to claim a pattern, published with their size stated so nobody mistakes them for one. At launch, exactly one figure on this page is held at that strength, the AI slice of the markdown mirror's readers above. Nothing else here is built on it.

Each finding below waits on the condition beside it, and leaves this list only through a review round.

• llms.txt before and afterThree to four weeks of after-data; the before-baseline and go-live date are already recorded.
• Crawl versus credit, Google editionAll joint Search Console days settled.
• AI training / search / user-fetch splitAI page views in the hundreds; one crawler session currently moves the split by 24 points.