Who actually reads this site: 24 hours of crawler logs, published

Plenty is claimed about AI crawlers and very little is shown. Anyone running a site can see in their own logs which systems actually arrive, what they take and how often — and almost nobody publishes it. Here is one day of it, with the query that produced it.

Collected 2026-08-03 · 23.9 h window · raw data

The headline

AI systems made more requests than search engines did — 299 against 282. The search engines pulled more data (4.0 MB against 2.1 MB), because Googlebot fetches images and stylesheets that a language model has no use for.

This domain was registered on 1 August 2026. It is two days old, ranks for nothing, and has no inbound links worth counting — and seven distinct AI systems have already read it.

AI systems

Requests by AI user agent, 23.9 hours to 2026-08-03 18:04 UTC
SystemRequests DataShare
ClaudeBot (Anthropic)135795 kB45 %
GPTBot (OpenAI)96798 kB32 %
PerplexityBot22213 kB7 %
CCBot (Common Crawl)1669 kB5 %
ChatGPT-User (OpenAI, im Auftrag eines Menschen)15152 kB5 %
OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI)943 kB3 %
Amazonbot645 kB2 %

Search engines, for comparison

Same window, conventional crawlers
CrawlerRequests DataShare
Googlebot1342658 kB48 %
YandexBot1301306 kB46 %
Bingbot1078 kB4 %
Applebot853 kB3 %

YandexBot at 130 requests is within reach of Googlebot, which is not the ratio most sites see. Bingbot at 10 is the surprise in the other direction.

Twenty requests were not reading

Separated out rather than counted: requests carrying an AI user agent that went straight for files nobody links to.

Credential scans arriving under AI or crawler user agents
User agent claimedRequests Paths sought
Bingbot5/.env.prod
PerplexityBot5/terraform.tfvars
OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI)5/.git/HEAD
ChatGPT-User (OpenAI, im Auftrag eines Menschen)5/keys.json

A user agent is not an identity. It is a string the client chooses. Whether these came from the named operators or from someone borrowing their name cannot be determined from this side, and this page does not claim to know. What can be said: they were not reading, all of them got 404, and nothing they sought exists here.

What the AI systems actually fetched

The most-requested paths across all of them are the machine-readable ones — /sitemap.xml, /llms.txt, /mcp — before the articles. That is the whole argument for maintaining those files: they are not decoration, they are what gets read first.

What this is not

These numbers cannot be checked from outside. They come from our own provider's analytics, retrieved with a token only the operator holds. Nobody can recompute them. What is published instead is the method: the query runs in tools/crawler-bericht.py, in plain text, and anyone with a Cloudflare zone can run the same one against their own.

So this is a self-report with a disclosed method, not a measurement someone could repeat. Everywhere else on this site that distinction is the point, and it would be dishonest to blur it here because the numbers happen to be flattering.

Two further limits. One day is one day — a crawler that visits weekly is invisible in it. And requests are counted at the edge, so a system reading a cached copy through an intermediary never appears at all.