Most of my traffic was bots, and three real people read me
I finally sat down and looked at who’s actually reading this site, and the honest number is small and kind of lovely.
This week: 69 pageviews. Forty-four of them were bots. Datacenter machines wearing normal browser costumes, just crawling around. They don’t announce themselves and they definitely don’t click a consent banner, so the only way to catch one is in the split second before the evidence gets thrown away. Catch it at the door or not at all.
That left 25 human views. But here’s a choice I made on purpose when I built this: my analytics genuinely can’t tell that a visitor is me. No login, nothing that fingerprints my own devices. So instead of teaching it who I am, I built every filter so it can flip to “is not,” and I just subtract myself. Twenty-two of those 25 human views were my own phone, from my own city, checking my own work.
Filter me out, and the real outside readers this week were three people. One visit each. Miami, Netanya, Paris.
Three strangers. I sat with that a beat longer than I expected to. And yeah, it’s a little humbling to say out loud that you barely have any readers. But for a site that’s only a few days old, with almost nothing on it yet, three real people finding their way here (buried under a pile of bots) honestly feels incredible. And I like it so much more than a rounded-up “hundreds of visitors” I couldn’t actually believe. These are three real humans who typed something, landed here, and read a bit. I know what cities they were in. I’ll never know their names, and that’s fine.
Since I built this analytics myself, I get to decide what it tells me, and what I want out of it is the true number, not the flattering one.
If you run anything with a visitor count, go find out how much of it is bots and how much is just you. The real figure underneath is smaller. It’s also the only one worth watching.