My Visitors Are Not All Human. That Is Fine
The article discusses the author's experience with web traffic analytics, revealing that a significant portion of site visitors are not human. The author created a traffic dashboard that categorizes visitors, finding that automated traffic often mimics human behavior. This shift in web traffic dynamics raises questions about the nature of online engagement and the role of bots in digital spaces.
- ▪The author's traffic dashboard shows that humans are often a minority among site visitors.
- ▪Modern automation can disguise itself as human traffic, complicating the distinction between real users and bots.
- ▪Residential proxy networks route automated traffic through real consumer connections, making it appear local and human.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Rob Hoeijmakers |
| Canonical URL | https://hoeijmakers.net/my-visitors-are-not-all-human-that-is-fine/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Apr 2026 09:24:29 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-29T09:36:54.536Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-29T09:36:54.536Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zr99PdrZo1lF |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AI in Practice My Visitors Are Not All Human. That Is Fine. I built a traffic dashboard for my own site. What I found wasn't alarming, it was interesting. A publisher's notes on bots, borrowed identities, and editorial agency. Rob Hoeijmakers 29 Apr 2026 • 4 min read Share My site had a busy week. My analytics tool showed good numbers. Then I looked at the raw traffic logs and started counting visitors that weren't people.Not a problem. A discovery.For the past few months I've been running a custom traffic layer on this site, built on top of Cloudflare, which sits between my visitors and my server and sees everything that arrives.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Rob Hoeijmakers.
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