AI scrapers use bogus URL tracking tags to make website visits seem legit #
17 August 2026
It looks like AI scrapers have been using a surreptitious method of making their marauding presence appear legitimate, this time by appending a bogus query parameter, or tracking tag, to the URL of the webpage they are targeting.
In the last month or so, I have seen a stack of page visit items looking something like this:
https://disassociated.com/?ref=yourwebsitepage/213page/page/page/14page/16page/page/2page…
I’ve replaced the actual website name with the generic yourwebsite marker in the above example.
What is particularly insidious though, is the way the crawlers are using the names of reputable websites and blogs that have linked to disassociated in the past.
Initially I thought some of these blogs had mentioned my website again, but after having a closer look at them, this is not the case. There’s also the detail that my web analytics app does not identify a referring page from the website supposedly sending visitors my way.
The frequency of visits doesn’t stack up either. I’m sure the blogs cited in the /?ref= parameter, that are supposed to be linking here, have many (human) readers, but I can’t imagine every last person, sometimes thousands of them, have been clicking through to my website.
Another possibility was my website had been shared in a newsletter. Usually though the URL query, or UTM parameter, I see in newsletters are along the lines of say ?utm_content, or ?utm_source.
One of the query parameters seen in the screenshot from my web analytics app does is ?utm_source though. However, with one exception I think, none the cited websites publish newsletters.
Also, if any of the cited websites were legitimately sending traffic here using a tracking tag, I doubt they’d use such a nonsensical URL path… page/14page/16page/page/2page… what?
It does puzzles me why these scrapers only seem to be targeting the front page of my website. Only a small amount of the total content posted here is visible there. But they’re AI bots, no doubt they know what they’re doing.
In the meantime, I’ll have to get used to seeing these analytics entries until I can figure out a way to block or mask them. That might be easier to say than do though.
But kudos (ironically) to Claude for acknowledging disassociated in response to a query about the Tiny Awards, in the above image. It’s much appreciated, truly, but doesn’t happen often enough.
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artificial intelligence, technology, trends