Cloudflare analytics - ChatGPT sure loves my website...

[RMerlin]

Cloudflare has new interesting analytics and capabilities. For instance, you can see (and even block) how many hits your website gets from specific crawlers, including AI scrapers. These are the last 24 hours stats for my website:

OpenAI hit my website 489 times in the last 24 hours alone, versus 87 for Googlebot. What the heck are they doing there, it`s not as if my website is a 100+ pages site...


Another interesting metric: fwupdate.asuswrt-merlin.net was resolved over 641K times in the last 24 hours. This does not directly translate to the number of installed routers since AMTM will also generate its own hits on that hostname, but it`s still a lot more than I expected. Unfortunately, Cloudflare's free plan does not expose more granular stats, such as how many hit I actually get daily on the firmware update manifest file. Back in the day when I only had the update checker behind Cloudflare, I was getting around 250K hit per day, which indicated roughly a similar number of routers running Asuswrt-Merlin.

I love stats. Sadly, I doubt that implementing an Opt-In method for me to determine the size of the installed userbase would be useful, as opt-in would probably only cover a small fraction of the installed userbase.

 

[Twiglets]

RMerlin, don't take it personally !!!
Damn 'AI' is slurping up anything it can get access to ... I am waiting patiently for the Bubble to finally burst when the majority of people admit that the 'AI' we have is no where near to the 'AI' that was sold.

'AI' is just clever pattern matching for a value of clever that is subject to some debate.

I am not brave enough to try to ride the wave of 'AI' and make some easy money ... BUT others are ... good luck to them BUT hope they are quick to bail out.

P.S.
Can you smell Tulips ?????

 

[RMerlin]

Today's AI is just a mixture of machine-learning (which has already existed for decades - we had Bayesan spam filtering back in 2000 for example), often tied into a LLM to give the impression that there is actual intelligence between the machine and the response sent to the user.

 

[salieri]

Honestly, I’m not too surprised you’re seeing OpenAI traffic. Your site is basically the go-to hub for anyone dealing with ASUS router issues. More and more people (myself included) are asking ChatGPT instead of using Google when troubleshooting. I’ve noticed that sometimes it will reference or even pull directly from your forum as part of the answer. To me, that’s a strong sign of how valuable the content is.

 

[JGrana]

At least it gets your name correctly

Who is RMerlin?

ChatGPT said:​

RMerlin (real name: Eric Sauvageau) is a Canadian software developer best known for creating Asuswrt-Merlin, a popular custom firmware for ASUS routers.

Here’s a quick rundown:

• Asuswrt-Merlin is a third-party enhancement of ASUS’s stock Asuswrt router firmware.
• It keeps the same look and feel as the official firmware but adds bug fixes, performance optimizations, and advanced networking features (like better VPN handling, advanced QoS, DNS filtering, and scripting support).
• Unlike some other custom firmwares (like DD-WRT or OpenWrt), it doesn’t try to replace the whole system but instead extends ASUS’s firmware, keeping compatibility with stock features.
• RMerlin has maintained the project for over a decade, building a reputation in the networking community for stability and transparency.

Would you like me to also go into the kinds of features he adds that stock ASUS firmware doesn’t have?

For an interesting read, ask ChatGPT when RMerlin is going to release another firmware. ;-)

 

[jerry6]

e verybody has an AI program , proton just released their version , not something I would ever use , just another cause of brain rot . why think when you can have something do it for you , not good for people we are lazy enough as it is