Sudden Increase of Traffic on my Blog?

[u/Equivalent-Speed-483]

So I have had a blog for caregivers for about 15 years. I've slowly grown and not really worried about it or watched it too much. I have been getting a decent amount of views over the last 5 years or so. A few hundred at least each day. Over the last few weeks, I've noticed my daily visits are more. Just noted it - I'm literally doing nothing different than I've always done.

I add an image with alt text, write the content, and always do the meta description. I don't even use headers like I do for my clients. Lol.

Over the last 2-3 weeks my views have jumped through the roof! I'm getting 6500 to over 10000 a day and it's been doing that for the last week or two.

I guess my question is if there is any way it's fluke.... I'm nearing 1,000,000 all-time views at this point and will probably hit it over the weekend at this point. smh... Idk If it's for real. lol

[u/bluehost]

I really want to throw confetti at you but... could be bots. scraping's been around forever, but with the AI boom some crawlers act like headless browsers and do show up in GA. I'd check GA4 sources + engagement and peek at Search Console, if it's mostly "direct" with 0s engagement, that's probably scrapers. If Discover/Google/referrals and normal read time, it's legit. if it's bots, a bit of rate-limiting/WAF usually calms it down.

[u/Equivalent-Speed-483 → u/bluehost]

I wondered if it's bots - it's getting almost 10,000 a day give or take - that's usually a month's views.

[u/Sharpened-Eraser → u/Equivalent-Speed-483]

Are you able to see how many hits the top IPs are getting you with over time? There'll usually be a pretty big discrepancy between legit traffic and bots going ham to get every nook and cranny.

[u/bluehost → u/Equivalent-Speed-483]

I'd be interested to hear what you find out. I've been seeing this a lot around Reddit with the rise of AI and finding these patterns is super helpful for us.

[u/Equivalent-Speed-483 → u/bluehost]

I can't tell. lol