I run a small Home Assistant / self-hosting blog. On a normal day a few dozen humans show up. So when I finally grepped my nginx logs for AI crawlers, the number made me stop: in nine days, AI bots hit the site 18,209 times. On a blog this size, the machines reading me now outnumber the people.
Here's the full breakdown, the things that surprised me, and a few points most "should I block AI bots?" threads get wrong.
The raw numbers (9 days, one small blog)
Of 348,667 total requests, 18,209 (5.2%) came from AI/LLM user-agents:
Bot
