The CSP Blog enjoyed year-over-year page-view and viewer-total increases from its beginning in 2015 to 2022. In 2023, page views and viewer totals fell from their highs in 2022. They fell further in 2024. But the trend has reversed itself here in 2025:
Great!
Is it real? This year also featured the largest one-day total in page views. A strange day in November–the thirteenth to be exact–featured 1300 page views. Stranger yet, most of those occurred in a single hour.
Well, maybe not that strange. It must have been a scraping. Or a scrape. I got dun scraped. I think it happened another time in 2025 as well, but the page views were less, maybe 400 or so (I can’t access detailed information very far in the past on WordPress). The large-language models are always gobbling up all they can see on the internet, so of course the CSP Blog gets stared at too, at least for a couple of intense minutes.
As I lamented in an earlier post, the scrapes make it hard to know how to evaluate the blog statistics reported to me by WordPress. What do page views even mean now? I can’t tell exactly how many page views are bots of some sort and how many are you, dear human, and your lovely kind.
But maybe there are other reasons to think the tide is turning against AI, ML, and LLMs. Or at least HI and AI might be coming to a sort of equilibrium. Maybe.
For example, consider the referrals to the CSP Blog between 2023 and 2025.
| Year | Search Engines | Chat GPT | Perp- lexity | Gemini | Claude | Others |
| 2023 | 17k | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 14k | 33 | 8 | 8 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 12k | 260 | 63 | 34 | 6 | 9 |
So the number of search-engine referrals is declining, the number of page views is increasing, and the number of LLM referrals is rapidly increasing (although still tiny). This is a good sign! The fear is that if people use LLMs as search engines, and the LLMs regurgitate/repeat/mangle what they’ve scraped from the web and don’t provide links to the original human-created web sources, blogs like mine will die. But ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are all starting to provide links. I expect Gemini to provide a lot more than 34 in 2026, as I believe people are shifting over from ChatGPT.
I’ve noticed something else reassuring. I’m the father of three Gen-Z boys (25, 24, 17), a high-school robotics coach, and a new high-school robotics teacher. So I’m around Gen Z a lot. (OK Boomer.) They are starting to reject AI/LLMs. Some of the same kids that were enthusiastic a year ago are now turning their backs on LLMs and generative AI. I think they (rightly) fear for their future careers, for the future of art, for the future of video games (which they cherish), for their social lives. They are craving meaningful work and true things and are mocking the slop. Good to see. Some of them are “AI vegans.” They don’t like the harm they see large-scale AI inflicts on the environment (water usage, data-center noise, increased energy consumption) and on people (low-wage offshore workers manually labeling datasets, chatbot-induced psychosis, brain rot, declining reading ability, etc.).
Happy New Year everyone! Looking forward to a bright 2026 full of human intelligence, robotics, and CSP.
