The bots are coming!

It used to be 10,000 unique visits ... per day!

The bots are crawling

Martin Joergensen

OK, I admit it. 10,000 unique visits per month isn’t bad. I know that a lot of sites would love to have visitors in that range.

But this site used to see better numbers. Much better numbers.

It used to be 10,000 unique visits ... per day!
The best month ever recorded was October 2014, where there were more than 17,000 visits per day.

If we go back about 10 years, and look at the years 2014 and 2015, the site was serving hundreds of thousands of visitors during a normal month, and showing millions of pages. And these were “real” human visitors. Not search engine crawlers, not AI bots, not odd Chinese page requests from obviously fake users.

A battle uphill

These days I’m fighting an uphill battle against automated traffic, which makes up a still growing part of the requests that try to read pages on GFF ... as well as basically all other sites.

It isn’t long ago that it was estimated that the web was now used by more machines than people, and that more than half of the traffic on the whole Internet was comprised of machines automatically and repeatedly making requests to each other. AI has a large responsibility here, but there are many other bots and crawlers harvesting human made content from sites like GFF.

I recently analyzed the raw log on this site, and the striking conclusion was that the appearant visitor count was enormously inflated. In a sample of just a few days in August 2026, more than 90% of the raw "unique visitors" appeared to be from automated systems. 90%! So for every 100 visits to the site, 10 at the most were from humans of flesh and blood.

... for every 100 visits to the site, 10 at the most were from humans ...

So not only did the visits from real people plummet, but the visits from machines with no basic interest in fly fishing and fly tying grew alarmingly.

Google is not a search engine, but an ad engine

Another pattern that has been obvious over the past 3-4-5 years is that search engines - and Google in particular - deliver way less visits than they used to.

The Global FlyFisher used to have about 50-80% of its traffic coming from people searching for relevant content. GFF has always been very well indexed, and has had a very high so called PageRank thanks to its age, size, quality content and abundance of incoming links from other sites.

But Google has changed from being a service that delivered search results to being a service that delivers ads, and that has made a huge difference. The number of incoming users from search engines is more like 10-15% of the traffic, and that has a huge impact.

Nowadays Google is a marketplace that is more interested in showing people Google's own content when a search is performed. Ads, sponsored links, YouTube videos and AI generated “summaries” dominate the search results, and good old fashioned organic results - links to the free and open Internet - are few and very low prioritized. Google has embraced a zero-click policy where its aim is to have people refrain from clicking away from Google.

At the same time the direct traffic has increased because all the bots don't use serarch engines, but simply browse the site directly going straight to a give page. The bots keep a list of URLs they want to crawl, and then hit them one at the time - often at an alarming rate of many pages per second, which is really bad bot behavior that bogs down the site and plagues real users.

Also, apps are an increasingly common way for real users to access online content, and apps can very efficiently control what people are allowed to see. In a browser there’s free access to all the web, but in an app, this access can be harnessed and controlled, and most apps do what they can to keep people from posting or surfing elsewhere than in the app. That also takes a lot of traffic away from old school sites like GFF.

Google delivers very few visitors

Martin Joergensen

Walled gardens

The result is that people don’t click on to “real” web sites like GFF, but stay within the walled gardens that are Google, Facebook, Instagram or whatever service or app that they are using.

This means a drop in traffic here, and that’s not only something happening to the Global FlyFisher. It’s basically all websites that have experienced these dwindling traffic numbers.

Luckily I can essentially ignore that, because I don’t make money from visitors through ads or subscriptions. But for sites, which depend on some kind of income based on visitorship, it’s a catastrophe. Money that used to go to support their business, now winds up in the already bulging accounts of the tech-giants and their owners and investors.

The big players - mainly Google, Meta, Microsoft, the big AI-companies - are sucking up the majority of people’s online time as well as the money it generates, and won’t entice the users - or even allow them - to roam the traditional web and support normal websites.

What does this mean for GFF?

While it does have some effects - like an almost total lack of interaction with users, which used to take place in comments and the forum - it means very little to the site.

Of course it bothers me that all the great content published here reaches fewer people than it used to, but I still keep on publishing, and still keep up the high quality, diversity and amount of content that’s been a hallmark of this site for decades.

It also bothers me that all interesting activity - posts, comments, images, recommendations and much more - takes place in closed circles on social media. I use Facebook and Instagram as little as possible, and don't use any other SoMe-services at all, so I miss quite a bit of the action there.

Just fly fishing and tying stuff ...

Martin Joergensen

The publishing rate on this site goes up and down as it’s always been doing, but new content does find its way to the pages ever so often, and much more is in the pipeline.

I enjoy writing and editing as much as I’ve always done, and will keep on doing this until I can’t muster the energy anymore.

I have also made various tweaks to the system to exclude all the non-human traffic. There are different ways to ask them kindly to stay away or to downright block them. I have used both depending on what was coming in. The result is that fewer automated systems ever see a page, and that the ressources are saved for visitors who are most likely human. But the result is also a fall in "visitors". Since the robots and crawlers made up more than nine tenths of the potential visitors, I saw a drop from close to 8,000 unique visits a day to somewhere in the 1,000 visits per day region. But since 8,000 was wildly inflated, I'm actually more interested in the much more realistic number - even though it's a far, far cry from the 10-15,000 daily visitors of the heyday.

So GFF serves less than a tenth of the number of people it used to back when it peaked in 2014 and 2015.

But don't worry. GFF isn’t going away anytime soon for that reason.

It’s just hiding under the horizon created by apps, social media, artificial intelligence, automated bots and what’s worse.

All you have to do to find it, is to go just a bit further into the wilderness that is the free and open Internet.

And Eureka!
There’s the Global FlyFisher as it has been the last 30 years.

GFF isn’t going away anytime soon