Is My Blog Content Being Stolen by Bots? A Blogger’s Experience

Lately I’ve been asking myself a question I never thought I’d need to: is my blog content actually being stolen by bots? Search engines like Google and Bing have always crawled websites, and that’s normal. But when one of my new posts here was hit nearly 900 times in just 24 hours, it didn’t feel like ordinary indexing. It felt like something else and it left me wondering if something is taking my work, where it’s ending up, and whether I’ll ever even know.

Illustration of a robot stealing ideas and text from a computer screen, symbolising bots scraping blog content without credit.

I’ve had other frustrating run-ins with bots before. A few times over the last 12 months, my main woodcraft site was practically hammered by one based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (if memory serves). It hit the site around 2,500 times in a short space, enough to trigger the ping of my live chat function every single time. With 70-odd main pages, nearly 2,000 products, and a blog attached, that sort of activity was more than just annoying and I had to turn off the function to get some peace.

Since then, I’ve known there are all kinds of crawlers out there: Google, Amazon, ChatGPT and other AI-related bots among them. Some are expected and even useful for visibility, but lately things have started to feel different.

TL;DR

Bots are hammering my blog posts with hundreds of hits in a single day, maybe once a month. Far beyond normal Google or Bing indexing. It makes me wonder if my content is being scraped or used for AI training without credit to me. While I can’t prove it, the patterns feel suspicious. Bloggers can’t block all crawlers without losing visibility, but it’s worth monitoring traffic, tightening up robots.txt, and protecting content where possible.

A Surge in Unusual Activity

Take my latest post: Best Takeaway in Tralee (For When You Don’t Want to Cook). Within just 24 hours, it was hit nearly 900 times, 30 times more than my most popular posts currently get. That had never happened before on any of my posts, and it set alarm bells ringing.

It wasn't my first food-related post, was it genuine readers? Unlikely. Was it bots scraping the content? Much more likely.

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Hypothesis: Where Does Blog Content End Up?

When a bot hammers away at a page hundreds of times, it’s not just “looking” at your work — it may be copying, caching, or storing it somewhere else. What happens after that is less clear, but here are some likely scenarios:
● Search Engine Databases – Google, Bing, and others keep cached versions of pages for speed and reference. That’s normal, and usually helpful for visibility.
● AI Training Sets – Large language models are built on enormous datasets scraped from blogs, forums, news sites, and more. Once your words are in that dataset, they might resurface as “AI-generated text” later — without a direct credit or link.
● Content Aggregators – Some sites automatically scrape trending or niche posts to fill their own pages with stolen articles. These often appear on spammy blogs that run ads around other people’s work.
● Affiliate/Marketplace Analysis – Big platforms like Amazon may scan blogs containing their links to gather data on what people are writing about and promoting.
● Dark Web or Niche Uses – Less common, but some bots scrape content to build private databases, sell text corpora, or fuel automated spam campaigns.
In short, once a crawler takes your content, you often lose control of how it’s used. That’s what makes the 900+ hits on a single post feel less like normal indexing and more like something else.

Who’s Crawling Our Content?

There are several possible culprits:
● Search Engines – Google, Bing, etc. constantly crawl to index posts.
● Affiliate/Ad Networks – Amazon and others often crawl to check links and context.
● AI Training Bots – Newer crawlers associated with ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others may be scraping blogs and websites to “learn” from them.
● Bad Actors – Some bots scrape entire pages to repost elsewhere, sometimes on spammy or low-quality sites.

Is My Work Being Used Without Credit?

That’s the real question. With AI models and content aggregators crawling nonstop, it’s fair to wonder if blog posts like mine are being absorbed into a database without my name or site attached. I don’t have proof, but the sudden 900-hit spike makes me suspicious.

It’s possible that content gets:
● Scraped and reposted – entire blog posts copied onto another site.
● Used for training AI – absorbed into datasets powering large language models.
● Indexed and excerpted – snippets appearing in search results or AI-powered answers, without directing traffic back to me.

If a human took your work, you’d at least have someone to challenge, maybe even a platform to complain to. But what happens when only fragments of your writing are taken, piece by piece, and your expertise is quietly usurped without you ever knowing?

How Can Creators Protect Their Work?

This is where it gets tricky. Bloggers and website owners rely on Google and Bing to crawl content so it can be discovered. Blocking crawlers completely would mean cutting ourselves off from search visibility.

Some practical steps include:
● Use robots.txt selectively – block suspicious or unnecessary crawlers while allowing Google.
● Monitor traffic logs – sudden surges can help identify abusive bots.
● Add watermarks or branding – for images especially, so stolen content still carries your mark.
● Claim your work – using copyright notices or even DMCA takedowns when you find stolen material.
● Consider AI opt-outs – some providers allow sites to disallow AI scraping in robots.txt, though enforcement is inconsistent.

I’ve even experimented with robots.txt myself. At one point I blocked certain crawlers from picking up my meta descriptions, but the result wasn’t great, my links looked bare and less inviting on Google search. That’s why I say “use robots.txt selectively” above. In the end, I undid the change.

Unanswered Questions

I can’t say for certain whether my blog content is being stolen by bots or simply over-crawled by the usual suspects like Google, Amazon, or AI scrapers. What I do know is that unusual spikes — like one post being hit 900 times in 24 hours — don’t feel normal. They raise questions that every blogger and website owner should be thinking about.

This is just my experience, but it’s a reminder of how vulnerable creators are once their work goes online. We need search engines to find us, but the same visibility also opens the door to bots that may not have our best interests at heart. For now, all I can do is stay watchful, protect what I can, and keep sharing my content anyway — because being read by real people is still worth the risk.

Conclusion: A Blogger’s Experience, Not a Final Answer

The internet was always a place where anyone could use your content freely but most of the time you got credit for it or traffic came your way which made it fair. Now it seems we may be entering a new era where what you create is no longer yours. To all those AI creation companies out there, please remember to give credit where credit is due.

A proper credit system for creators would be a fairer way to treat content online. If our snippets, expertise, or explanations are being pulled directly into AI responses, why not a financial credit? Google Ads shows impressions and clicks, why can’t AI Overview do the same?

I’d love to hear what other creators think about this. Do you see the same patterns I’ve noticed? Drop a comment below if you care to share.

Thanks for Reading,

David

About the Author

I’m David Condon, a small business owner and blog writer based in Tralee, Co. Kerry. Running my own woodcraft business means I’ve seen first-hand how much confusion there can be around shipping times, delivery dates, and what “business days” actually mean. That’s why I wrote this post — to share a bit of what I’ve learned and hopefully save you some frustration.

Every so often I step outside the workshop to write about wider business topics like this one. If you’d like to know more, you can follow the link in the Note from the Author section below.

Every so often I step outside the workshop to write about wider business topics like this one. If you’d like to know more, you can follow the link in the Note from the Author section below or visit my About Me page to learn more.

💬 Note from the Author
This post was written specially for David Condon Finds. If you enjoyed it, you might also like my other projects:

Phoenix DVD Blog – where I write about DVDs, Blu-rays, and life as a collector
David Condon Woodcraft – my main site focused on woodturning and handmade Irish pieces

If you’d like to support my writing, you can do so through the Buy Me a Coffee button below. It helps keep these side projects going — thank you!

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