81.8% Of My ‘AI Assistant’ Traffic Was Fake. The Googlebot Number Was Worse via @sejournal, @DuaneForrester

A new website experienced a significant portion of its "AI Assistant" traffic being artificial, with 81.8% identified as fake. This discovery was made by analyzing crawl data, which revealed that ClaudeBot, an AI crawler, was more active on the site than Googlebot. The author, Duane Forrester, shared this finding on Search Engine Journal, emphasizing the importance of verifying crawl data to distinguish genuine user activity from bot traffic. The data indicated that the majority of interactions attributed to "AI Assistants" were not from real users or legitimate search engine bots performing standard indexing tasks. Forrester's analysis highlighted discrepancies between expected search engine bot behavior and the observed traffic patterns, suggesting a need for website owners to scrutinize their analytics more closely. The article provides insights into how to obtain and interpret verified crawl data to accurately assess website traffic and identify potential issues with bot activity. This situation underscores a growing challenge for website owners in distinguishing between valuable bot traffic and potentially misleading or harmful bot activity that can skew performance metrics.