3.6 million requests, a handful of humans: Sagentica publishes its own bot-traffic wake-up call
Albany, Oregon founder shares an embarrassing week of numbers to show how bots dominate web traffic, and how easily dashboards and AI summaries make them look like an audience
ALBANY, Ore., Oct. 14, 2026 — In a single week, Cloudflare logged 3,636,443 requests across the 2,596 domains owned by Sagentica. On the 271 of those domains where the company runs browser analytics, real browsers loaded 1,240 pages, and only 37 domains had any real page loads at all.
The company measured one group closely: four domain-guide websites and their alternate extensions, 16 domains in all. Cloudflare's seven-day view for them showed 146,146 requests. When founder Jeff Johnson asked the AI assistant in his Cloudflare dashboard for unique human traffic, it answered: about 72,000 requests from about 4,000 unique visitors. Asked again with a more detailed breakdown, it estimated two to five humans a week. Browser-based measurement recorded 26 real page loads.
Sagentica, the Albany, Oregon holding company behind the domain marketplace Domain Dumpster Dive, published the full numbers today as a case study in how thoroughly bots now dominate traffic on small websites, and how dashboards and AI summaries can present that traffic as an audience. About half of the 146,146 figure was Cloudflare counting the same request twice internally. Of the 72,768 requests that actually reached the company's 16 domains, most came from automated scanners: in one 24-hour period, 44% asked for WordPress or PHP files that do not exist on the sites. A timeout rate of 18%, first mistaken for an outage, turned out to be four hourly bursts of scanner traffic.
"It's embarrassing, we get it," said Johnson. "But we're not too proud to take a beating if it shows other site owners what's really behind their numbers. A seven-day lookback can show over a hundred thousand hits, and it can come down to a handful of actual humans."
Checking bot settings across his portfolio of 2,596 domains, Sagentica also found that 204 had Cloudflare's "Block AI bots" option switched on, shutting out the AI search engines the sites were meant to reach.
Sagentica blocked the scanner traffic with a single firewall rule, added source tracking to every link to its marketplace, and rebuilt the four one-page sites into 23 pages of guides on valuing, pricing, selling and trading domain names, written to be readable by people, search engines and AI answer engines.
The full report, including method and limits, is available at https://press.sagentica.com/research/the-visitors-who-werent-there.
About Sagentica
Sagentica is an independent holding company in Albany, Oregon, that builds and operates AI tools, online directories and domain-name businesses, including the domain marketplace Domain Dumpster Dive. Learn more at https://press.sagentica.com/about.
Media contact
Jeff Johnson, Sagentica · press@sagentica.com