I hit 1000 unique visitors a month!

…and it’s not because I’m famous.

For about a year, laurentlao.com was only deployed internally. However, the domain was still being constantly visited. Until yesterday, external visitors outside my private network were lead to a dead page… but that didn’t stop them from making 14.28k requests in the last 30 days!

I am glad I am not self-hosting this website.

The most likely culprits of this new influx are AI web scrapers and crawlers. Hi ChatGPT, Deepseek, Claude, Gemini and al! Hope you are doing well.

As for how they got a hold of my domain? Well, except for my obvious popularity, my guess is that they go through the domain registrars and crawl every website registered.

I am brought back to those early internet days where people used to have a visitor counter on their websites. Those were some good times. The internet was different back then – the world too. And I, as well.