There have been reports in recent months that web site traffic decreasing presumably because people are either using LLMs to answer their questions of Google is giving the answer without the reader needing to click through. This is a problem for sites that earn money through ads or other visitor based streams.
Recently I've noticed my traffic increasing and was pleased this morning to see that my all time page views has just exceeded 3 Million.
I doubt that the site is really getting more "organic" viewers so my theory is that this traffic is lots of AI Large Language Models training on blog posts. Bill at the great Soldersmoke blog notes a similar increase.
Another annoying trend is comment spam. Random comments on posts from any time with something nice and a link to a business. Often these are car repair, skip bins or small builders. My theory is that someone has been hired to do Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) by generating links to the business on web sites around the place to increase the ranking. They look like this:
I click the "mark as spam" every time but it doesn't seem to do anything. I wrote to several of the businesses, via their contact us form. One replied and didn't seem aware of what was being done in their name.
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