What traffic & bots flow to your site after you make it to the front page of Hacker News? Do AI bots crawl as much as Google? Which is the most aggressive bot? Which is the least and thriftiest?

A recent post hit the front page on hacker news. Google just made you a search quality rater.You won't get paid.

This was something I wished to know so I built a little bot detector on this site. Of course using Claude, the bot.

The code basically measured the traffic over 30 days and I built a simple analyser within the code to output the following data.

Across 240,060 visits from 24 distinct bots, AI crawlers (35.0% of traffic) tied search engines (35.0%) for the top slot.

If you care about this industry then that's the headline. The rest is nerding in data.

The setup

We log every visit from a recognised bot user-agent into a single table. The fields are bot name, category, path, day, hit count. 240,060 hits, 24 bots, 5,074 distinct URLs touched.

We bucket bots into five categories: search (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.), ai (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, AmazonBot, etc.), seo (Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic, Screaming Frog), social (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest), and archive (Internet Archive).

Category split

AI crawlers tied search engines at 35.0% each.

Most aggressive bots

Hits per day, averaged over the period.

Most polite bots

Hits per path. Lower = visit and leave.

Most obsessive bots

Re-scrapers. Few URLs, hammered repeatedly.

Most thorough explorer

Distinct URLs touched.

Rare visitors

Bots that barely show up across 30 days.

Methodology

• Source: nexus_bot_visits table on mojodojo.io's production database. One row per (bot, path, day) with a hit counter.

• Bot detection: User-Agent substring match against a curated list of 32 known bot patterns. Unknown / spoofed UAs are excluded.