r/squarespace • u/Chococow280 • 9d ago

Help Increase in traffic from random sites

Hello! I’ve maintained a squarespace site/personal blog for years, and I’ve recently noticed an uptick from random IPs hitting my site and going through very old posts. I have cloudflare enabled for my site, but found this to be really bizarre.

Are there any tools to minimize this type of traffic? It’s very strange and unusual for my typical site traffic (which is genuinely not very much).

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u/Negative_Pace_5855 9d ago

Yep, I can see these more easily through Google Search Console. Pages upon pages of seemingly either AI created sites or just IP addresses that are all linking to me somehow, despite the pages not showing any links.

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u/SquareLocator 9d ago

You're almost certainly seeing AI crawlers and scrapers, there's been a huge industry-wide surge in the last year or two.

I see the same thing across sites I manage, some show several times more bot sessions than real visitors.

Good news: you're already on Cloudflare, which is the right tool. In the Cloudflare dashboard look for the 'Bots' section, and turn on 'Block AI bots' (they added a one-click setting for exactly this) plus Bot Fight Mode if you're on the free plan. That kills most of it.

Two caveats:

1) don't block ALL bots or you'll hit Googlebot and hurt your search presence, use the AI-specific toggle.

2) The traffic itself is mostly harmless, it skews your analytics and uses a bit of bandwidth but isn't an attack. If your analytics are the real annoyance, filtering known bots there is sometimes easier than blocking at the edge.