kagi.com referrer being abused by bots

In my last article, I said how I noticed that this blog is being visited by the American Osteopathic College of Radiology, and how I believe that these are just bots faking the referrer field. After another week of glancing at my analytics, I suspect that kagi.com referrer is being abused by bots as well.

From around the mid-October, I started to receive much more traffic with the source of kagi.com. The traffic is diverse, and comes from different countries and different devices. However, the pattern has changed around November 3rd, where the majority (81%) of the traffic is now coming from one place: Singapore. The US is taking 5% of the traffic, and a bunch of other countries take <1%.

If I filter specifically on Singapore, ALL the traffic is coming, allegedly, from Chrome, on macOS, on a Laptop device (viewport width between 992 and 1440 according to my analytics). All the traffic is split between 3 articles: I am a Prompt addict from October 27, The bots situation is crazy from November 6th, and How I vibe-code from November 7th. The kagi.com source was practically non-existent before October 13th.

I don’t store visitor IP data beyond what I can derive from it, so I can’t check it against known data-center IPs. But I did read somewhere that Singapore is being the hot-spot for bot traffic from Asia at the moment.

I don’t mind bots scraping the web, I mean we are way past the point of being upset about that. I do, however, feel slight discomfort that we are getting closer and closer to a point where trusting anything becomes mentally, and technologically complex problem. I don’t want to put stupid Cloudflare bot check or another solutions that harm the actual people who read my blog, but at this point it’s practically impossible to know if anyone at all reads this blog, or any other blog on the internet.

Or, asking a more general question, are there any actual people left on the internet, or it’s all just bots and AI?