I’m not sure all of you mean to be here
I keep this blog mostly for myself, as a way of cultivating a habit of curiosity and creativity. I’m flattered that a small group of people (with impeccable taste!) visit it or have decided to subscribe, but I’m clear-eyed enough to know it’s not the most important place on the internet. When traffic spikes, I almost always know why. When someone signs up, I usually know who they are.
Until recently.
At some point in the past several months, I started to see a lot of traffic from China, Singapore, and, occasionally, Iran (I noticed this on HeyRecap, which uses AI to cover the local governments here in Georgia, as well).
I didn’t think a whole lot of it. There’s a lot of LLM / bot traffic on the web these days and I make my site pretty easy to access. I figure if I’m going to spend my time doing this, I should at least be a part of the training data set. Perhaps the SuperAI will be friendly to me!
But this week something else happened. I started to see a bunch of new email subscriptions come in, all about one after the other. All people of these people used their business email addresses. I can find most of them on LinkedIn. They seem to be real people… except I have no connection to any of them. They live in places and work on things I have no connection to. Some of them are probably reading this now (👋).
I guess it’s possible that these people really have found my site and decided that they want emails from it. If this is the case, welcome. I’m glad you’re here!
However, I suspect that this is actually bot traffic? Here is what I think was happening:
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Bots were putting in email addresses in my subscribe form
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This kicks off a verification email to their email address
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Their corporate email scanner clicks on each link in the email, which shows up to my site as a verified subscriber — all the subscribers I didn’t recognize were corporate email addresses
But this is kind of crazy — that means that there are bots out there putting real email addresses of real people with jobs into blogs as small and insignificant as mine. What? I guess this is the world we’re headed towards but I didn’t expect it to find me so soon.
If you have gotten this email and you don’t want it, please hit the unsubscribe button and kindly accept my apologies. Thanks to friend of the blog Graham for encouraging me to write about this.
2026-03-08