The AI onslaught

For the past few years I’ve just been posting annual summaries on this blog¹, but I’m going to make an exception today to announce an important change.

First some background - the battle against the bots and the rising costs due to AI

This pretty well documented now, starting with Almost all searches on my independent search engine are now from SEO spam bots and An update on the automated SEO searches issue in 2022, with updates on the issue in 2023 and 2026.

Just to put that into perspective - yesterday I served 378,890 search requests. That is a lot of processor power being burned, because each one of those searches requires a computation - this is not simply (for example) serving a statically rendered blog page. Of those 378,890 searches, only 76 were from real users, and the rest was from botnet traffic (which hides behind residential proxies² so is impossible to block). That’s 0.0192% of traffic from real users.

What I haven’t mentioned before is how few of those real user searches are likely to return anything useful. Most of the searches are for adult material or other things that are very unlikely to appear on people’s personal sites. So the actual genuinely useful searches yesterday could be counted on 1 hand. So that’s around 0.001% of traffic from real users performing useful searches.

And the cost of servicing all these bots has been escalating thanks to the AI bubble - see Hosting costs increasing 40%, income static.

Which brings us the the new issue - large volumes of automated submissions of AI slop

One of the features of searchmysite.net, to try to make it better than other search engines, was to index only user-submitted (and moderated) sites. The idea was that if someone found a personal site they liked they could submit it to searchmysite.net and that would help searchmysite.net get slightly more useful for the next people using it. (What actually seemed to happen was that people submitted their own personal sites and never came back, but that still helps in some way.) Each submission had to be moderated before being indexed though. That means I had to spend time and effort manually reviewing each submission.

However, since early August 2026, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of submissions. One day I got 40 new submissions, with 33 submitted at the same time suggesting the submissions were automated. These have been taking an increasing amount of time and effort each day to review. And on closer inspection it appears that almost all of the new submissions are AI generated slop. Clearly I’ll reject these so they won’t get indexed in order to try and keep the index clean, but this takes time and effort.

The breaking point came when I got an automated email from an AI agent this morning asking why their submission had been rejected!

The change - anonymous submission of sites is no longer permitted

So that’s the change - it is now no longer possible to submit suggestions for Basic listings anonymously. You will need to either submit your site as a Full listing (which gives you a login), or ask someone with a Full listing (i.e. has a login already) to submit on your behalf. Full details of the change are in Require login to Add Site to stop spam submissions.

It is possible the AI agents may find some way to fight back, so this might not be the end of the story, but if nothing else it should offer some temporary respite.

I always try to look for the positives in things, and am generally pro-technology. Even as the most of the internet has been been turned into a cesspit over the years I’ve tried to say it’s not all bad and there’s still some good out there. But with this onslaught of AI agents and AI generated slop I really am struggling to think of any upside or any way it could possibly end well.