I prompted ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini and watched my Nginx logs

https://surfacedby.com/blog/nginx-logs-ai-traffic-vs-referral-traffic

Article

  • Author prompted four AI tools with their site URL and monitored Nginx access logs.
  • Found distinct traffic patterns: ChatGPT hammers URLs, Claude respects robots.txt.
  • Gemini showed no distinct user-agent — already had site indexed via Google crawl.

Discussion

  • Commenters suspicious the article itself is AI-written (ironic given the topic).
  • Pithy summary from HN: ‘ChatGPT DDoS-lite, Claude the polite one, Google was already in your house.’
  • Prompt injection via ChatGPT-User agent flagged as an obvious attack surface.
  • Discussion notes important distinction: training crawls vs. live web-fetch vs. deep research agents.

Discuss on HN


Type Link
Added Apr 20, 2026
Modified Apr 20, 2026