There was a time when website traffic meant people.
A spike in visitors meant popularity. A referral from a social network meant attention. A server struggling under load suggested success. The architecture of the web was built around a fundamentally human assumption: readers would arrive, consume information, and leave.
That assumption is no longer true.
Today, many independent websites receiv...
The rise of AI systems consuming public websites as raw material introduces another problem that current observability tools are poorly equipped to analyze. Operators often lack understanding about which AI entities are crawling them, how aggressively they are fetching, whether they honor cache directives, and the economic exchange between the operators and these AI systems. The article suggests that this shift could lead to issues such as systemic infrastructure exhaustion, unequal economic exc...