Wow, it's the site's 54 millionth hit. These "hits" aren't a measure of humans visiting pages; that count would be much lower. It's just requests to the website: every time a robot visits some page, the count goes up. If a human views a page that contains a dozen graphics, those graphics cause another dozen hits. So "a million hits" isn't as impressive as it sounds. But hits are easy to measure so that's what I measure. We can take a look at the log:
3.235.215.92 - - [16/Aug/2026:10:14:14 +0000] "GET /new/2010/05/29/phae-decaying-you-remember-how-i-wrote-that-href/ HTTP/1.1" 200 4200 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) Chrome/119.0.6045.214 Safari/537.36"
OK, looks like Amazon.com has a webcrawler that fetches web pages to feed to an AI so Amazon can understand reviews better. E.g. by fetching my old blog post about a dangerous-but-impressive play structure no longer in a children's playground, perhaps some huge×huge matrix of weights somewhere slightly increased a number associated with "concern for safety."
Robots continue to dominate the traffic. That's both because AI companies crawl pages; and because people don't tend to follow links from AIs to source documents. E.g. Google says that zero (0) people clicked Google results to visit my pages in the last month. Wow, I'd heard that Google was sending fewer people to websites since most folks were content with the AI summary. It sure seems true. Digging through yesterday's logs, I found some probably-human visitors. I noted where the first came from: kagi.com, a much less popular search page. Apparently some kagi.com users still click links and visit websites. OK, looking at one web-visitor is an anecdote, not statistics…but it's weird, man. Or perhaps it's the new normal.
Anyhow, if the web traffic here became 99.9% robots, I suppose I would keep blogging. Even if web traffic were 100% robots, this would still be a handy place to draft posts for my socials 🤣
