I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI bot traffic
- ID
- 35350
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 13 Oct 2026, 11:25 PM
- Fetched
- 14 Oct 2026, 9:59 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.sammystraus.com/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 7.5
- Created
- 14 Oct 2026, 10:00 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coderssaas_startup_founders
What happened
After Sammy Straus's sprinklz.io feed reader (which can deprioritize topics, including LLM news) picked up ~100 upvotes on Hacker News, the site got progressively slower over the following days. Per-endpoint logging showed most requests never fetched articles or ran the single-page app's JavaScript at all, and aggregate NGINX logs revealed nearly half of all traffic came from one service that polls sites many times per minute to summarize changes into what Straus calls an 'AI slop newsletter' — which he blocked. The remaining offenders were self-identifying known crawlers, including Claude bot, OpenAI bot, and Google's search indexer.
Why it matters
If you run a public site or a small SaaS, this is a concrete warning about how to read your own metrics: a single aggressive scraper took close to 50% of this site's traffic, and because it never executed the SPA's JavaScript, it was invisible in normal page-render analytics and only showed up in NGINX logs and top-level per-endpoint request counts. The practical move is to log requests by path, IP, and user agent, then rate-limit or block at the edge — especially on metered hosting or serverless, where bot polling can turn into a real bill.
Discussion angle
If a scraper that never renders your SPA can be half your traffic, what does your analytics actually measure — and where do you draw the line between Google's indexer, which you need, and an AI newsletter bot that just costs you money?