# My Blog’s Biggest Fans Are AI Bots. So I Fought Back. > Source: > Published: 2026-07-29 09:53:38+00:00 Member-only story # My Blog’s Biggest Fans Are AI Bots. So I Fought Back. For several days, I thought I had gone viral on a whole new level. My daily blog reads jumped from around 600 to nearly 2,800, with a single post carrying almost the entire spike. Then the skepticism crept in: my daily reports could not tell me where the new readers were coming from, and a jump that large with nothing to explain it felt less like a win than a question. It pulled me into an investigation across AWS WAF, the CloudFront console, and a long back and forth with Claude. In this post you will learn how I spotted the AI bots crawling my site, why they burn your CloudFront quota and pollute your analytics, and how I fought back with AWS WAF, from challenges and blocking to charging bots for access. ## When “Viral” Traffic Is Really AI Bots Crawling Your Site The post absorbing nearly all of that attention was my write-up on [Claude Code best practices](https://ranthebuilder.cloud/blog/claude-code-best-practices-lessons-from-real-projects/), at roughly 14K views. The irony is not lost on me: the machines’ favorite reading on my site is my guide on how to use the machines. However, missing a viral moment I never had only bruises my ego. The traffic itself costs me in three ways at once.