My Blog’s Biggest Fans Are AI Bots. So I Fought Back.

A blogger discovered that a sudden traffic spike from 600 to 2,800 daily reads was caused by AI bots crawling his site, not human readers. He identified the bots using AWS WAF and CloudFront logs, then fought back by blocking or charging them for access, as detailed in his investigation.

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.