AI crawlers are inflating your view counts

Thoughtbot's blog post revealing that AI crawlers are inflating view counts by making up most of a site's traffic marks a significant issue for website owners, as server-side analytics count every AI crawler as a legitimate view. This means that website owners are likely misinterpreting their website's performance, as their view counts are heavily skewed by AI crawlers, including scrapers, rather than actual human readers. This can lead to poor decision-making based on inaccurate data, such as investing in content that appears popular due to AI traffic. To address this issue, website owners can take several actionable steps: first, implement client-side analytics to filter out AI crawlers; second, regularly review and update their llms.txt files to block unwanted AI traffic; and third, use bot-detection tools to identify and exclude AI crawlers from their server-side analytics, ensuring that their view counts accurately reflect human engagement with their site.