The trails of the theftbots

06.10.2025/00.37

This was interesting: how the “AI” theftbots (yes, I’m coining that word) affected Autocade’s traffic. We had blocked a bunch of them already—notably the western ones and ByteDance—but there were many others that still got through. This is from Cloudflare, but even their default settings miss a bunch, especially Chinese ones, and they don’t […]

The extra things you now do in online publishing: blocking suspicious bots

21.09.2025/10.37

Unfortunately, we’ve had to block some individual IP addresses as we suspect they’re guilty of stealing content from Autocade. These aren’t the clearly marked “AI” bots, but individual IP addresses that have hit the site at a far greater frequency than humanly possible, and some have tried to access non-existent pages that could not possibly […]

Switching things around: a post about bots written by a human

19.07.2025/10.44

Sadly, while these Autocade visitor numbers look rosy, Cloudflare does count bots, even if the bots go no further than notching up a “visit” on the system. No data are transferred to them. Fortunately, we have our page-view counter, and with every known “AI” bot blocked on our end, including a bunch that Cloudflare […]

Why should any server resources be given to SEO?

07.07.2025/10.18

Vindication of yesterday’s decision to block Alibaba’s bots on Autocade: it’s attempting to access load.php with a huge string, not one that would normally be available to a casual web user As Autocade’s visitor numbers surge to over a million a month today, we are continuing to make sure the bots are blocked (and, […]

Excuses, excuses

05.07.2025/11.14

You’d think ChatGPT would get details about itself right. I wanted to check something out after adding more anti-bot rules to Cloudflare for our highest-traffic websites. (I had to do this manually as Cloudflare’s own method appears to block a few legit bots, like Huawei’s Petal search. That’s another story.) I know this goes against […]

“AI” bots drive Wikipedia traffic up 50 per cent—as we already witnessed in 2023

02.04.2025/11.21

Another thing I experienced before others: “AI” scraping causing a substantial increase in bandwidth, notably at Autocade in 2023. In Wikipedia’s case, this happened last year, as the “AI” bots sent their bandwidth up 50 per cent. Casey Newton writes: Post by @caseynewton View on Mastodon The bots steal, do not give attribution, and […]

It’s ﬁnally mainstream to report what Big Tech has been about for over a decade

28.02.2025/00.26

Now that the world is waking up to Big Tech and its shenanigans, there is less need for me to post about them. Finally, what was once very evident to me is becoming mainstream thought, from Big Tech’s kowtowing to the suppression of a free press. I posted because it was frustrating to see everyone […]

Autocade reaches 40 million page views; thank you, humans

09.12.2024/00.33

Autocade has now hit 40 million page views, with the counter at 12,353,148, to be added to the previous installation’s 27,647,011. We’re 159 over the milestone. There has been plenty of activity as we added some pages to match Autocade Year of Cars 2025, our new print yearbook, sitting on 5,222 models, a healthy 114 […]

How to deal with the shrinking, independent, human web

29.10.2024/04.52

I alluded to this earlier this year when we redid JY&A’s links’ directory, but Joan Westenberg confirms it with some real stats. Once upon a time, the web seemed limitless, but now ‘we’re trapped in digital zoos built by tech giants. Google. Facebook. Amazon. Apple. Microsoft. They’ve carved up the web into their private empires, […]

Semrush’s continued dishonesty, and potentially one fewer outlet to expose them

18.10.2024/01.03

Is this why Search Engine Land refused to run our release about Semrush? Because now, Semrush is their parent company, and they would have known that the deal was happening when they received the release. We also now know that I was right about what was going on—and the biggest names in the search engine […]