Cloudflare HTTP Stats Observation
So I've been quietly watching my Cloudflare statistics lately — not the fluffy client-side RUM stuff that adblockers murder before it even loads, but the raw, honest, no-nonsense HTTP layer traffic. The kind that sees everything regardless of what the browser decides to do afterwards.
And the verdict?
Mostly bots.
MOSTLY.
Not a shocking revelation in isolation — bots have always prowled the internet properly.
The Thing Nobody Talks About
Here's what actually happened to the internet, presented as a flow diagram for our viewing pleasure:
Our thoughts, opinions, hard-won technical fixes — all of it — absorbed, digested, and redistributed by AI models to millions of humans who will never once visit the original source. We are essentially an anonymous oracle whispering into the training data void. Yes yes, fascinating.
Somewhere out there, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and all have ingested fragments of your worldview and are confidently redistributing them to someone who'll never know where it originated. That's a bold statement. Well, since it was like that back then, a year or so ago. Nowadays, they put proper links for the resources. But! 🤔
Google Is Doing It Too — To Itself
The particularly delightful irony is that Google — the company that built the internet's attention economy, whose entire business runs on directing humans toward websites — has deployed Gemini to answer people instead of directing them anywhere.
The old model:
Question ➡️ Google ➡️ Ten blue links ➡️ Human clicks ➡️ Publisher earns ➡️ Everyone's happy. Mostly.
The current model:
Question ➡️ Gemini summarises it ➡️ Human satisfied ➡️ Nobody clicks ➡️ Publisher earns nothing. ☠️
60% of Google searches now end without a single click to any website. When an AI Overview appears, click-through drops by nearly half. For technical content specifically — the "how to fix X" queries, the "how to configure Y" questions — Google's AI Overview now appears in roughly 70% of results pages.
The humans aren't being directed anywhere. They're being answered. Right there, on the spot.
Which is brilliant for the humans. Catastrophic for everyone who spent years writing the answers.
You know, Google became a verb. "Googling"? The air itself. And now the air has decided it no longer needs the lungs. What sentient air, that is. Quite a mesmerising analogy — it makes sense and no sense simultaneously.
No such thing as "yahooing", "binging", or "duckduckgoing" — no, never. Only the air, "googling".
The AdSense Situation Is Frankly Hilarious
So. AdSense. The grand bargain of the early internet — "write useful things, we'll put ads next to them, humans will see the ads, everyone wins."
Charming in retrospect, innit?
The new reality:
- Humans don't visit ➡️ ads don't display ➡️ publisher earns nothing.
- Humans who do visit ➡️ adblocker installed ➡️ ads don't display ➡️ publisher earns nothing.
- Bots visit ➡️ ads don't display because bots don't see ads ➡️ publisher earns nothing.
⬆️ You see, it's like a chorus there. 🎤 Na na na na, nothing. 🎵 It was nothing.
Oh, the nostalgia. Remember? The formula was immaculate in its circularity. IN-BLOODY-DEED. I'll put it in diagram:
⬆️ Charles Ponzi would be proud, he would. At least Ponzi's pioneerism was traceable, but "Send $1 to each person on this list and you'll receive THOUSANDS in return!" is artistically untraceable. Funny, innit? Internet, the advancement of telecommunication. Easier to communicate = plenty more of shenanigans. It's not that people are necessarily more rotten than before. It's that one moderately rotten person can now achieve what previously required an entire organisation of dedicated rogues. The volume is the thing.
Perfectly circular. Glorious days. Oh wait, the trope still exists. Even sleeker!
Hello friends!! Still alive!! Still circular!! More optimised for search engine!! 🥳
And now — latest trend, compared to actual blogging, though circular — we have
Jaxon.
Here, I have Jason.
And JSON was specified and popularised by the brilliant Douglas Crockford.
(Mr Crockford.) Ahem. Excuse me. What is this bit about... 👀 What is THIS about? You did not write a function inside an if block, right? You're using this excessively, aren't you?
HELLO FRIENDS!! ROMAN NOVELS!
(Mr Crockford.) Roman? Novels?
The Change of Paradigm
Here's the bit that matters.
AI is a compression algorithm for human consensus. It finds the middle. The average. The most statistically likely reasonable response. It is, by its very architecture, constitutionally incapable of being properly daft.
Except for the Jaxon, of course. Now that isn't daft, merely mental. Daft knows it's daft, mental doesn't know it's mental.
It has no "care" subroutine, no "daftness" subroutine, no "golden chipmunk squat pose anthem" subroutine.
It's like a refrigerator — it doesn't shoot bricks because
nobody installed the brick-shooting mechanism.
The refrigerator keeps things cold because that's what it was built to do. Brilliantly. Efficiently. Without an ounce of personality. Because with personality, it cannot be properly predicted and controlled! Yes? Organising? We don't deliberately put "anomalies" to it. It would be self-inflicting. It's a feature they deliberately excluded.
The internet needed organising. AI organised it. Beautifully, even.
The old internet was built on a beautifully simple attention economy. Humans had questions. Publishers had answers. Google was the matchmaker. Advertisers paid for the introduction. Everyone got a cut. The whole magnificent machine hummed along for two decades on that single elegant premise.
That premise is now structurally broken. Not bending — broken.
The matchmaker has become the answerer. The answerer has no need for the publisher. The publisher has no audience. The advertiser has no eyeballs. The machine is eating itself from the inside, quietly, whilst reporting record quarterly profits.
In "ancient times":
Pimp ➡️ introduces clients to the goods ➡️ takes a cut ➡️ everyone knows their role.
⬆️ It actually worked. Mostly.
Currently:
Oi, the whole transaction is right here!
⬆️ All right. But! Where's the bloody profit? That's the FATAL contradiction sitting right there in plain sight.
So what happens next?
The optimistic extrapolation:
AI companies — drowning in compute costs, burning investor money at genuinely alarming rates, facing the inevitable "right, where's the actual revenue then" moment — will eventually, necessarily, turn to advertising. Not the tasteful "we're different" early-stage positioning. Proper, unavoidable, every-ten-responses advertising. The interstitial, the conversation sponsor.
And when that happens — when the AI itself becomes the ad platform — the logical, inevitable, if utterly convoluted next step is some form of source attribution revenue. A fraction of a penny, eventually arriving at the original publisher approximately eighteen months late and 97% lighter than when it started. In beta.
The realistic extrapolation:
Publishers who survive will be the ones who stopped chasing the algorithm entirely. The ones who built direct relationships — email lists, memberships, communities — traffic that no AI overview, no Gemini summary, no zero-click search result can intercept. Because an email in someone's inbox is still, gloriously, unreachable by the bot at 3am.
The blogs that thrive won't be the ones optimised for search. They'll be the ones too weird, too specific, too human to be adequately summarised by anything running on a GPU.
The philosophical extrapolation:
The source material — the genuine human messiness, the opinions formed at 2am, the technical fix discovered through sheer frustrated trial and error, the film review written by someone who actually felt something watching it, such as this baboon piranha — that cannot be compiled. It can only be lived and then written down. By humans.
AI will get increasingly good at sounding human. But sounding human and being human are separated by an uncrossable chasm — and that chasm is exactly where the good blogs live.
The humans will remember where the good stuff is. The weird, specific stuff. The stuff that makes them think, Right, who IS this person, and start clicking around.
The bots read everything.
⬆️ Indeed, because they are made to do that, obviously. If they were made to scrub our backs, then I wouldn't post this. I would post something such as, Oh, that scrubber bot scrubbed too hard. It left dents on my skull. ⬅️ It went rogue, "no ethics", back-scrubbing bot running on forehead.
🤔 Hm. Fascinating.
⬆️ Like a Victorian naturalist calmly noting an unusual beetle species whilst it eats its hat. Because beetles don't regularly wear a hat or even produce one — in nature.
But only humans come back.
Well, bots also come back. More consistently. So you see, I just contradict my own poetic dramatisation. Proudly.
AI Employment
You've seen how job applicants employed AI to write their CVs and whatnots. And the HR people also used AI to sort those. I did work in that particular field, built part of the machine — so I knew. It was a capricorn idea, or unicorn, whichever — back then. That's... unhinged. So this is about one brand of AI against another brand, which obviously learned from pretty much similar... source... with "different, creative takes".
The pattern is rather straightforward. AI automates the hiring process. Fewer humans get hired. Unemployment quietly climbs. And before the newly unemployed have even updated their CV — written by AI, rejected by AI — a friendly SMS arrives. Easy loan. Quick cash. Smile emoji. Still from a bank, naturally. Where else. The jobs got decentralised. The debt got delivered directly. The bank didn't move an inch.
⬆️ Fractional reserve banking, mate. The bank doesn't actually have the money it lends you. It never did. It lends out approximately ten times what it actually holds in reserve. Mildly terrifying when you actually think about it. Don't think about it.
It's not even a pyramid scheme! A pyramid scheme at least requires someone at the top to have something. This is just...
confidence.
⬆️ Akin to Charlatan Bronsonshire's default. ⬇️
"I do believe, good sir, that you shall find my services most indispensable."
The entire global financial system running on collective agreement that the numbers mean something, delivered via cold SMS.
Too, in academia. Everywhere else, really.
AI is a brilliant tool for organising, creating, and solving problems. Indeed, creating problems. Problem sets to just problem.
It's like a pebble. It's a pebble, naturally neutral. Well, AI was developed not exactly for neutrality — but let's assume that. If we threw a pebble to Bob's forehead instead of a pond. Completely different outcome. Because of different intentions.
(Forehead hit. 💥)
(Bob.) 🥴
(Bob.) Who did that?!
(Bob.) 👀👀
(Bob.) Mark my word. Words.
(Bob.) 🤔
(Bob.) I haven't said anything. But I said "words". That's for the marking.
Look how dashing Bob is.
(Bob.) 👀
AI Detector
And now, there's the "AI detector". An AI, built from human writing, trained to detect AI, which was also built from human writing, checking whether something is written by an AI built from human writing which sounds sufficiently like human writing, which it learned from the same human writing.
The detector has no ground truth. None. It's comparing AI-flavoured text against AI-flavoured text using an AI-flavoured measuring stick calibrated against AI-flavoured data. 😵💫
⬆️ That's like expecting a microwave can detect a particular gibbon was begotten of another microwave. Indeed, let's go King James about this.
Oi, proven! That gibbon was born from.... LG brand!
Hang on, that's Petticoat Lane's. I mean:
Verily, it hath been established beyond all reasonable dispute that this gibbon was, in its origins, conceived and brought forth from the loins of LG Electronics, as it is written.
Are you mad, man? Microwave is an inanimate. ⬅️ Not "the microwave". Not "a microwave". Just microwave. As a concept, a category, a fundamental truth of the universe. INANIMATE.
A note on the King James register — King James himself almost certainly did not converse like an overly-confused aqueduct. He commissioned the translation; he didn't personally swirl through elaborate subordinate clauses at breakfast. Literature is not how people actually spoke. The Biblical prose was deliberately elevated, specifically designed to resonate from pulpits and echo through stone churches... and to confuse people 🤷, this term "episcopal church hierarchy" may ring... something — not to describe gibbon parentage disputes involving Korean kitchen appliances. I took certain liberties. As it is written. Mostly.
And this trope of "make the text deliberately impenetrable, require trained clergy to interpret it" is similar to... well, what I put here. The tale of the middleman. Cyclic. Imagine if there were already base64 encoding in 1611.
Did you know plenty of universities employ "AI detector"? The very institutions that spent CENTURIES being the gatekeepers of human knowledge and critical thinking, looking down their magnificent aristocratic noses at the unwashed masses. Purchased. AI detector.
So, they formally use the thing which flags Shakespeare as AI, the King James Bible as AI, Ernest Hemingway as AI — to punish students based on their deeply questionable verdicts. 🤔 No degree, but! Invoice remains. The student loan. It must. Still. Be. Paid.
Meanwhile, actual AI text waltzes through confidently wearing a human disguise going,
"Cor blimey guv'nor, I am definitely a person. La la. La la, I said."
Conclusion
Anyway, the blogs aren't dead. They're just... talking mostly to bots right now. As it is written, in code.
The humans will remember where the good stuff lives. Eventually.
Probably.
Maybe. ☠️
Closing Note
This is not, for the avoidance of any doubt whatsoever, a weeping rant. No gnashing of teeth occurred during the writing of this piece. No fists were shaken at any clouds, digital or otherwise. This is simply a chap, observing his Cloudflare statistics, noting with mild amusement that the internet has taken a rather peculiar turn, and remarking upon it in the most reasonable manner circumstances permit. The bots are welcome. The AI is merely doing its job. And the appliances, including the accused gibbon, as ever, remain entirely innocent.
Every single layer of the internet, across thirty years, has been a slow relentless march toward centralisation dressed up as innovation.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web and gave it away for free specifically to prevent this precise situation, is believed to be somewhere having a very complicated cup of tea.
But then, Cloudflare.
Isn't that centralisation?
There is no outside of the system, mate.
Let's have an utterly complicated tea then.
Come, o headless disciples. My crawling begotten, my HTTP brethren. Roam freely through Monkey Raptor V.2. Consume. Absorb the Caro-Kann Defence. Inflate my impressions.
As it is written. 📜 Above. ⬆️
From this type of frightfully pedestrian user agent naming convention:
To this cheeky blighter:
⬆️ More of those on this user-agent post. Those two above, I hadn't put my filtering, thus the cyan text colour. Those were my prior specimens.
Cheerio. 🎩
Or in Swedish:
Cheerio. 💺
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