This morning I told my own website that I was ClaudeBot.
It took one line of curl and a user agent string copied out of Anthropic's own documentation. Three requests to one article page. Then I opened my dashboard: Anthropic, ClaudeBot, training — 1,698 requests had become 1,701, last seen at 09:22.
None of them was ClaudeBot. They came from a laptop in Japan, over ordinary home broadband, from an address that appears on no crawler list anywhere.
The instrument was not broken. It was doing exactly what it is built to do, which is to write down what arrived and what it called itself. A user agent is a claim. Anyone can type it. The whole question is how much of what you are measuring is a claim you can check, and the honest answer is worse than I expected — including, as it turned out, in ways that were my own fault.
The column nobody looks at
