Why Am I Seeing An Exponential Increase In Blog Views?
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I’ve been writing a music blog since 2011, but have been pretty inactive the last couple of years for various reasons. Typically I get between 30 & 100 views per day. That changed about a week ago, when it jumped to 869 views and then saw exponential increases as high as 22,000+ views yesterday. The only referrer is Google Search with 20-30 views a day. I know my blog didn’t suddenly become so popular, so I’m perplexed by this increase. Does anyone have any ideas or explanations?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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The sudden surge in traffic to kamertunesblog.wordpress.com from 100 to over 22,000 views is likely caused by either a Google Discover feature or an aggressive AI/Search Engine crawl. If your music reviews were picked up by Google Discover, your content would be pushed to thousands of mobile users based on their interests, though this often appears simply as “Google Search” or “Direct” traffic in basic stats. However, if the surge shows thousands of views but very few unique visitors or zero new comments and likes, it is more likely a bot or scraper—potentially an AI firm indexing your 13-year archive to train its models. To confirm the cause, check your “Top Posts & Pages” stats; a single viral post suggests a Discover hit, whereas traffic spread across hundreds of old, obscure posts indicates a deep-crawl or bot activity.
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Thanks so much for your reply, James. The views are spread between many posts, with the highest number for any post in the 500 range, all adding up to 22,000+ (two days in a row). So it sounds like the AI bot option you mentioned. Any idea how to stop it, or will it just run its course and move on to something else? As long as it’s not a risk to my blog I guess it’s not a big problem, but I will start blogging again at some point and it would be nice to have reliable stats at that point. Once again, thanks.
Rich
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While these bots usually run their course over a few days once they’ve finished “reading” your 22,000+ pages of archives, you can actually speed up their departure by going to Settings > Reading in your dashboard and checking the box that says “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”—though be careful, as this also hides you from Google. If you want to keep your Google ranking but stop the AI bots specifically, you can use the “Block AI Crawlers” toggle often found in the Jetpack or Security settings (depending on your plan level), which adds a “Do Not Enter” sign specifically for AI scrapers without messing up your real search engine visibility.
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Hi there @kamertunesblog If you look at the forums directly, you might also notice that there are numerous reports of stats gone wild. https://wordpress.com/forums/topic-tag/stats/ So you are not alone in this and WordPress.com is aware of the issue. Hope that helps somewhat.
Here’s a bit more about setting up your site’s Privacy settings including how to limit access to 3rd party sharing https://wordpress.com/support/privacy-settings/make-your-website-public/
Post back here if you have more questions.
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Thanks for your feedback. I’m happy to report that, after 10 days of insane numbers of views at my blog, things went back to normal on Saturday. I guess AI got everything it needed from me.
Cheers!
Rich
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