Show HN: A page that hides a sentence for AI and lets you check if it came back
A new webpage has been created to explore the interaction between AI crawlers and human readers. It features a hidden phrase that can be checked by users to see if AI-generated summaries include it. The page aims to highlight the prevalence of automated traffic on the internet and the nature of web crawlers.
- ▪The page tracks software reads versus human reads using persistent counters.
- ▪Automated traffic has surpassed human traffic for the first time in over a decade, according to multiple reports.
- ▪Users can verify if an AI has crawled the page by checking for a hidden phrase in AI-generated summaries.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
— A note on what the page does — Sources & Confessions Every number on this page is drawn from a source the reader can inspect. The prose is hand-written. A few honest footnotes follow. The two counters in Act I this page’s KV-backed render log · Imperva 2025 Bad Bot Report The counters show software reads vs. human reads for this specific URL. Every render of /taken/agents increments one of two persistent counters in Vercel KV (no TTL), chosen by whether the request’s User-Agent matches a known crawler signature. Human readers execute JavaScript and the page’s render-callback ping confirms it server-side; crawlers do not. The numbers shown are this page’s own truth, not a global aggregate.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Since You Arrived.
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