A stormy sunset over the sea in Aberystwith, Wales

I thought I was done with website woes when I recently upgraded to the latest version of Squarespace, but alas, the AI-dominated world we live in now has other plans. I could go into the ramifications of Google switching to its AI summaries as its primary search result and the result that is having, but I’m saving that for a bigger post. The TL;DR version is I’m becoming increasingly reluctant to write articles here, when they’re only going to be stolen and repurposed by Google, while it simultaneously kills any search traffic to the site. But there’s another problem that I’m sure most other photographers and other website owners have had to contend with, and that’s the problem of bots.

You know this is affecting many websites due to the huge rise in Cloudflare “are you a human” authentication boxes. I even saw some twit on X the other day complaining because his personal Claude bot couldn’t get past one of these dialogs. It’s actually becoming a serious problem, and unfortunately, at the moment, there’s no easy way to prevent them on Squarespace.

Just this past week, I had a traffic spike of 25,000 page views that were entirely bots. This totally messes with analytics, and more importantly, they’re almost certainly up to no good, either scanning the site for malicious reasons, attempting to hack it, or just stealing my content. And the most frustrating thing is that there is a whole cohort of people out there who don’t see a problem with this, and that we should just roll over and accept our fate to the AI overlords. It’s incredibly depressing.

I actually have no idea any more if the content I write is successful or not. The analytics in Squarespace are basically useless now because they don’t have any bot prevention, so half the traffic is basically meaningless. Google Analytics is also not much use because, in its case, the bot filtering is perhaps too aggressive. On top of that, the cookie law means that at least 20% of people turn cookies off, blocking Google Analytics. (the Squarespace one captures more because some of it is cookie-agnostic.) On top of that, traffic continues to decline as Google is slowly choking off search traffic.

Anyway, this is the reason I’ve been posting less on here. I’m basically just writing content for Google and other AI companies to steal now, and until I come up with a solution, I’ll be dialling back my writing on this website. If anyone has any ideas on how to address this situation, I would be grateful. There is an option on Squarespace to ask AI not to scrape, but it basically does nothing because most of these companies or third parties aren’t exactly ethical.

I will still write here, just a little less often until I can find a way to stop this. There’s also my other photography blog, which doesn’t seem to suffer from the same problem yet, and you can also find my writing over on my Medium blog, designtography.