AI crawlers now match Googlebot in traffic to our site
What traffic & bots flow to your site after you make it to the front page of Hacker News? Do AI bots crawl as much as Google? Which is the most aggressive bot? Which is the least and thriftiest?
A recent post hit the front page on hacker news. Google just made you a search quality rater.You won't get paid.
This was something I wished to know so I built a little bot detector on this site. Of course using Claude, the bot.
The code basically measured the traffic over 30 days and I built a simple analyser within the code to output the following data.
Across 240,060 visits from 24 distinct bots, AI crawlers (35.0% of traffic) tied search engines (35.0%) for the top slot.
If you care about this industry then that's the headline. The rest is nerding in data.
The setup
We log every visit from a recognised bot user-agent into a single table. The fields are bot name, category, path, day, hit count. 240,060 hits, 24 bots, 5,074 distinct URLs touched.
We bucket bots into five categories: search (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.), ai (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, AmazonBot, etc.), seo (Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic, Screaming Frog), social (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest), and archive (Internet Archive).
Category split
AI crawlers tied search engines at 35.0% each.
Category | Hits | Share |
|---|---|---|
AI crawlers | 84,080 | 35.0% |
Search engines | 83,980 | 35.0% |
SEO tools | 50,820 | 21.2% |
Social previews | 20,700 | 8.6% |
Archive | 480 | 0.2% |
Most aggressive bots
Hits per day, averaged over the period.
Bot | Category | Hits/day | Total hits | Unique paths |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Googlebot | search | 1,228 | 36,840 | 1,474 |
Bingbot | search | 1,187 | 35,610 | 1,785 |
AmazonBot | ai | 1,101 | 33,040 | 1,442 |
MajesticBot | seo | 1,062 | 31,860 | 2,026 |
ChatGPT-User | ai | 812 | 24,350 | 239 |
ClaudeBot | ai | 581 | 17,430 | 647 |
AhrefsBot | seo | 485 | 14,550 | 1,279 |
LinkedInBot | social | 478 | 14,340 | 15 |
Most polite bots
Hits per path. Lower = visit and leave.
Bot | Category | Hits/path | Unique paths |
|---|---|---|---|
AhrefsBot | seo | 11.4 | 1,279 |
Applebot | search | 11.9 | 575 |
MajesticBot | seo | 15.7 | 2,026 |
SemrushBot | seo | 16.2 | 265 |
Bingbot | search | 20.0 | 1,785 |
AmazonBot | ai | 22.9 | 1,442 |
Googlebot | search | 25.0 | 1,474 |
ClaudeBot | ai | 26.9 | 647 |
Most obsessive bots
Re-scrapers. Few URLs, hammered repeatedly.
Bot | Hits/path | Total hits | Distinct paths |
|---|---|---|---|
LinkedInBot | 956.0 | 14,340 | 15 |
FacebookBot | 170.3 | 6,130 | 36 |
ChatGPT-User | 101.9 | 24,350 | 239 |
Internet Archive | 16.0 | 480 | 30 |
Most thorough explorer
Distinct URLs touched.
Bot | Distinct paths visited | Total hits |
|---|---|---|
MajesticBot | 2,026 | 31,860 |
Bingbot | 1,785 | 35,610 |
Googlebot | 1,474 | 36,840 |
AmazonBot | 1,442 | 33,040 |
AhrefsBot | 1,279 | 14,550 |
ClaudeBot | 647 | 17,430 |
Applebot | 575 | 6,840 |
Rare visitors
Bots that barely show up across 30 days.
Bot | Total hits | Days active |
|---|---|---|
Internet Archive | 480 | 2 |
Baiduspider | 480 | 9 |
DuckDuckBot | 470 | 11 |
Twitterbot | 160 | 4 |
DotBot | 80 | 5 |
Pinterestbot | 70 | 4 |
Google-Extended (Gemini) | 60 | 1 |
Screaming Frog | 50 | 5 |
Methodology
Source:
nexus_bot_visitstable on mojodojo.io's production database. One row per (bot, path, day) with a hit counter.Bot detection: User-Agent substring match against a curated list of 32 known bot patterns. Unknown / spoofed UAs are excluded.
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