news.ycombinator.com
My website gets more attacks than human visitorshttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48677487I run a small self-hosted website on a Raspberry Pi 4B at home. A few weeks ago I started wondering: who actually visits a website in 2026? Not just humans. Everything. So I built a public observability dashboard on top of GoAccess that separates traffic into four categories: human visitors, search engine crawlers, AI retrieval agents, and automated attacks. The numbers from the last 17 days surprised me:4,523 human visits 6,409 automated attack attempts Thousands of crawler requests from search engines and AI systemsThe attacks aren't sophisticated. They're mostly automated scanners probing for .env files, WordPress admin panels, and cloud credentials — hitting every public IP on the internet regardless of what's actually running there. What I found more interesting was the AI agent behavior. AI retrieval agents (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Amazonbot) behave differently from traditional search crawlers. They hit semantic files aggressively — llms.txt, sitemap.xml, JSON-LD structJun 25, 2026 6:35 PM






