Finally getting decent organic traffic

I have a wordpress page. For eons, it's gotten about 60 or 70 hits a day from perhaps 8 to 10 unique visitors unless I post something. 

in the last several weeks, I've had days with 500 or more views.

Almost all of the traffic says it comes through google, but the origin of the browser views are typically one or two locales when that happens, and when I view by city, the city has a data center. 

Difference is, other than the baseline security for the site, I have no way to block it without paying to upgrade the service to use widgets or whatever they call them. That would appear to be increasing the monthly cost of the site to pay another monthly cost for the widget app and who knows how good the widget would be. I wouldn't pay, anyway - so your situation may be much different here. I wonder if the bots are doing some kind of mimicking or traveling through google in some way that is intended to evade software blocking. 

I guess this is our future, though. It seems incredibly wasteful and nothing good is going to come of AI for humanity - it's just going to allow a concentration of income toward a few places and drive up power bills (data/AI has already driven up power a significant amount here).

Your 100k is my 500. 

I just don't have a way to prevent it mining my site, though I don't really care that much, I don't like the underlying implications, and especially the enormous waste. 

My site is just basically a thought dump - I can't imagine that AI will be able to do anything useful with the info on it, but it's welcome to try. I think I may have said it before on here, but I tried to use GPT to find round bar that's not easy to find in the US, and it was unable to. It asked me what I wanted it for and then was off to the races and cornered me with what became through the response pattern, very legitimate questions of the likes that you would get let's say if you were talking to an enthusiast one level below where you were with your methods. 

I don't know why I bothered, but what it had stated to me was far enough off that I cleaned up what it said. not off by opinion, but off by fact, most likely because a lot of information about metallic bits is off - it seems to be a breeding ground for romance among knife and tool enthusiasts, and when it comes to woodworking, some of the presentations and articles written are abysmal, but popular. Again, not abysmal by opinion, but stating things that are factually false that could easily have been found by searching for something like "micrograph O1 vs. micrograph blue steel". 

the only question at this point is whether GPT takes that information in as a credible datapoint and uses it everywhere, or if it takes it in to tailor itself to be more attractive to use for me. I use it only limited amounts, and generally for work when I need a stronger search engine than google. At this point, google is just about worthless for a lot of things because it provides what pays it the most to put in front of you, which is often off the mark and garbage. 

For example, I tried to find a sports score site yesterday that doesn't have articles about betting or betting information clogging up the only thing I actually care about - what's in the game, and the first two pages of google's responses were the sites with the most betting information. i gave up after that. I know what I'd really like for sports scores - a command prompt that has a few bytes of data about each current game in a given sport and refreshes only when you ask it. 

something on the order visually of the dir/w command in dos.