Something Fishy Is Going On

On the 4th of October 2024 we posted about having written 6000 blog posts which had been viewed 4,408,662 times.

Things have changed since then: our all time visits now stand at 11,288,340, with 26,799 visits yesterday, and 482,374 visits last month.

I was interested enough to ask ClaudeAI what the reason could be. I had my suspicions, and this was the answer:

This is a really interesting question, and I think I can offer a strong likely explanation — though there may be more than one factor at play.

**The most probable cause: AI bot crawling**

Your blog covers nature, wildlife, history, French life, and food — exactly the kind of rich, detailed, original content that AI companies are aggressively harvesting to train their large language models. Automated traffic surpassed human-generated activity for the first time in a decade, accounting for 51% of all web traffic in 2024. Since then it's grown further.

Research from 2024 found that a record 16% of "general invalid traffic" from known bots was generated by AI scrapers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and AppleBot. These bots hit every page they can find, and Blogger/Blogspot doesn't filter them out of your view counts the way more sophisticated platforms do. Your 6,000+ posts across many years give bots an enormous amount of pages to crawl.

Crawling traffic spiked twice — first in November 2024, then again between March and April 2025 — which aligns suspiciously well with your traffic jump from October 2024 onwards.

**Other contributing factors worth considering:**

- **Compound SEO effect.** 

With 6,000+ posts built up over years, older posts continue to accumulate search ranking authority over time. A blog that old and that prolific keeps climbing organically in search results for niche queries about French nature, Loire Valley history, orchids, dragonflies, etc.

- **AI-generated search results driving curiosity.**When AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity cite or reference content about French natural history or life in the Loire Valley, some users do click through — even if the click-through rate is low.

- **Growing anglophone interest in rural France.**There's been sustained growth in people researching relocating to or visiting rural France, which is squarely your content.

The short version: you've built a genuinely valuable archive of content at exactly the moment AI companies started hoovering up the internet, and your view counter is almost certainly catching a lot of that automated activity.

I was right in my suspicions, but this is slightly worrying. The half life of facts would suggest that much of the stuff on the blog no longer applies. Add in the whimsy, local misdirections and suppositions and I wonder how relevant a lot of the information is now. We don't set out to deceive, but anyone looking for definitive, up to date information is likely to be directed by AI to restaurants that no longer exist (I've checked), boulangeries that closed 10 years ago (checked that too), and expect the sewing machine man to be at the market (not for many years). Or indeed other towns that have "Preuilly" in their names.

This is just one reason we would never use AI to write a blog post - once you have fact checked everything it turns out easier to do it ourselves -  although I have in the past used AI to restructure and check grammar and spelling (UK English).

Should I ask Claude how many times he has crawled the blog?