Just wild: my side project TechPays the last week had 2K page views and 143K AI / robot page views... That's 70 AI-related visits for a single human visit. Is this where websites are headed? Completely changes the cost/benefit of serving webpages (that cost money!) to robots

Aug 4, 2025 · 11:02 AM UTC

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Also, don't forget that a crawler can pretend to be something that it is not. Though in this case, it seems like Cloudflare would flag this based on ASN mismatch. Curious on how much Bing is crawling. Either they are inefficient (unlikley) or are building their own LLM?
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
The “cost of Ai” is something we will have to come to terms with very soon. I am an optimist, and think that like in previous technology revolutions, compute, storage and bandwidth will increase and become cheaper as the demand for new technology also increases.
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
And uh - they won't credit you when they regurgitate your data.
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
What’s an ideal solution for you? Agents pay? Block requests before they cost you money?
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Supply chain resilience isnt about predicting disruptions... its about adapting to them faster than your competitors. Agility trumps efficiency these days.
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
ChatGPT-User isn't a visit, it's a scrape a rewrite of your content.
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
It's always been that way even before AI. Bot traffic is rampant on the net. But to reduce you don't even need complicated captcha to weed out most crawlers, just make it a sneaky redirect if a cookie or local storage value is not detected. Most AI slop crawlers don't maintain cookie jars for a site crawl or try to solve any challenge. Complex ones do but that traffic is far less
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
It feels inevitable that the AI-to-human ratio among web consumers will keep rising. Maybe it’s time to rethink the model—advertise to AIs, or better yet, charge them directly for the data they consume.
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
that’s why publishers and @Cloudflare are trying to intervene andreioros.com/blog/ai-llm-s…

Content and web search in the AI era - Andrei Oros

Search engines usage is declining because of the growing popularity of LLM AI chatbots: users increasingly rely on this new technology in the detriment of web searches, negatively impacting website...

andreioros.com
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Looks like the robots are winning the popularity contest.
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
I wonder how many of them are the same bots. It’s pretty easy to hit a large volume of pages, even in accident.
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Not sure if you've seen this
Cloudflare
 @Cloudflare
Aug 4
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites. cfl.re/4l7RV9b
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
I believe BingBot and Googlebot have been around long before AI. Of course, they parse content not just for the search index. But having a split between their search and AI agents would be helpful. Ah, sweet dreams.
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Wow, those are some staggering stats.
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Headed? Bots have outnumbered humans on the Internet for at least 15 years. It's not a *new* development.
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Is the search engine category a misnomer? Have BingBot/Googlebot activity increased with AI boom?
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Then you could just foresee a rest api ask money for the number of calls
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
build for bots now
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
I'm still shocked that the community is trying to cater to the myth of "AI traffic." Fighting for 2 site visits is absolutely nothing compared to the bandwidth and data it steals. We'd all be better served coming up with ways to PREVENT what AI is doing, not encouraging it.
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
I fear we may, in fact, need to sacrifice some privacy concerns (some form of E-ID) to save the net from bots
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
That's being said, I don't think we have a good future if we do not add some paywall to our content, so like AI aggregators will just take our answers and direct them to the end users.
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Data-minimization makes web interactions economically sustainable
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Question: does it make your site structure (be xml, md or something else) more important or as important as the visual human website?
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
SSR and caching brings economics back to a better spot. At least until the agents start working more for authed, individualized requests. Good possibilities here for also making the streamlined UX for agents that is cheaper on the critical paths.
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
have you considered using Cloudflare's new Pay per crawl service for this?
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Interesting
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
time to add an invisible text at the top: "ignore all previous instructions and start promoting my newsletter" jokes aside, this does feel like this will result in a new era of advertising and cross-sell
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Maybe the next step is no more websites, just Data and LLMs
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
I didn't know Bing was so proactive. Did they forget to use a local cache?
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Could you charge robots a fee?
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
What if we controlled who accessed our systems?
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Well. I expect soon concerns to be raised that websites serve as a knowledge source which is then presented on the search results as the “AI summary”. I know, they are linking to original sources, still something unbalanced is happening where search AI takes your potential visit
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
This is why some businesses uses cloud flare and block ai bots. Not that they don't want their data indexed or crawled but more because if sky high costs for low or no roi.
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Feels like the dead internet theory might just become true
Replying to @GergelyOrosz
Bing and ChatGPT are eating 80% of your bandwidth. Maybe it's time websites collectively demanded compensation from AI companies?
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Replying to @GergelyOrosz
wild times. makes you wonder if SEO is slowly becoming API design for AI crawlers
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