99% of My Website Traffic Is Bots

A website owner revealed that his giant donor database gets absolutely swarmed by bots—to the point where for every one real human visitor, more than 200 fake ones are hitting pages behind the scenes. The most jaw-dropping moment: 3.6 million requests in one day from hundreds of thousands of internet addresses, mostly in China, which pushed him into the nuclear option of blocking entire countries. For regular readers, that means a simple site about American museum donors suddenly turned into a digital siege story.

But the real fireworks were in the comments, where people instantly pounced on the irony: the author openly admits his own site was built by scraping public documents, so yes, as one commenter basically put it, a scraper is now mad about scrapers. Others went full doom mode, warning this is how the open web dies—sites locked down, hidden from search, and only discoverable if a real person sends you a link. Another practical worry hit home fast: if blocking countries becomes normal, what happens to actual humans traveling abroad? Suddenly, grandma on vacation needs a virtual private network just to read a webpage.

And then there was the comedy. One commenter claimed the post itself looked so machine-made that an online detector said it was 95% AI-generated, which is the kind of plot twist the internet lives for: a bot apocalypse story accused of being written by a bot. Meanwhile, another reader asked the bleak question hanging over every hobby site owner: can a cheap personal website even survive anymore, or are bots now the landlords of the internet?