Interesting. I publish an off-topic blog post without advertising it anywhere, 1.5 hours later my stats show 130 visits but only one request to the website’s CSS file. I guess I’ve inadvertently created myself a bot honeypot, regardless of what their user agent says. One bot actually made three identical requests except for the user agent: Safari, Axios and Firefox.

There is a certain increase in bots masquerading as regular browsers here, it’s almost 40% of them. I’m fairly certain it weren’t that many a few years ago. Some bots claim to have been referred by Google, an oddity that I’ve already noticed in the stats for new articles published in the past months.

So, is everybody and their dog scraping web content for AI training these days?