it's bots all the way down

Stats-wise, March started off the way February ended: quietly, and with relatively few hits. But within a few days, my unique-visit numbers were back in the thousands, then the teen-thousands, and even though I'm not even halfway through March, I've already broken the February stats record. For the past few days, I've been getting over 20,000 visits per day. Yesterday ended with over 28,000.

And I'm convinced it's all bots.

Remember how February was a strong month, with 10K to 15K visits per day before the end? And remember how it all suddenly fizzled out? I called that "swarming behavior" for lack of a better description, and I now think that that's what I'm seeing. Over 20K daily visits is unimaginable for me, and it's not translating into any sort of fame or infamy. I'm not getting comments from strangers who have declared themselves to be new readers—not even AI-inflected comments. I suspect I can lose all of these "visitors" by ceasing to post for a day or two: within 36 hours, 20K visits will drop down to 400-600 visits per day, easily.

So this whole thing is grade inflation, if you will, and while the average proportion of bot visitors for normal blogs is around 50%, in my case, I'd say it's closer to 90%. So I do not give myself any credit for the inflated numbers.

It's bots all the way down.