🔗 99% of my website traffic is bots

99% of traffic on a website isn't from human visitors, and one site owner shares their battle against bots. The article outlines a year-long struggle managing scrapers on a 1.5 million-page philanthropy donor database called PatronView. With a staggering ratio of 214 bot page loads for every real human pageview, the owner discovered the impact of various bots, including those from China and AI-driven crawlers. They implemented several measures, including country-wide blocks and tailored firewall rules, to restore some semblance of normalcy. The piece details techniques employed to combat the overwhelm of bot traffic, improving site performance, and even blocking well-known crawlers that brought little value. Readers gain insights into the challenges of website management in the age of aggressive bot traffic.