What I’ve Measured

I run the tokens myself, and I keep logs. Over the last three months that has turned into a small pile of original numbers, scattered across essays and field guides. This page puts them in one place.

Small site, small samples. Every figure below says when it was counted, and where a number was read by eye off a chart, it says that too. When a number changes, it changes here first.

01 · The fetch logAI assistants reading this site

Counted October 15 to November 9, 2026. Source: Generative Engine Optimization for a Personal Site, updated November 9

• 277live reads of real pages by AI assistants answering someone’s question, about eleven a day.Oct 15 – Nov 9, 2026 · scanner probes under borrowed assistant names removed
• 57% / 42%Claude did 57% of that reading and ChatGPT 42%.Oct 15 – Nov 9, 2026
• 81of the 277 reads were one page, the Mac mini guide. Four guides took 189; the homepage took 20.Oct 15 – Nov 9, 2026 · the Mac mini guide
• 21live reads in one day, on October 19, the busiest day so far.Oct 19, 2026
• ~halfof the raw log was not assistants at all. The first ten days logged 234 “live reads”; 123 were real pages. The rest were scanners hunting for password files.Oct 15 – 24, 2026, re-counted Nov 1
• 163 / 108real-page fetches by Anthropic’s training crawler and OpenAI’s search crawler.Oct 15 – Nov 9, 2026

02 · Two months of GEOSearch, and the answers inside AI

Counted September 7 to October 23, 2026, from Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Source: Generative Engine Optimization for a Personal Site, published October 24

• 33 → 93pages in Google’s index, from September 12 to October 23. It was 82 on October 8.Sep 12 – Oct 23, 2026
• 42 → 8.5average Google search position, the four weeks after September 13 against the four weeks before.Aug 16 – Oct 11, 2026
• ~6×daily appearances inside Google’s AI answers, the week after every guide got a visible “Updated” date, against the week before. Read by eye off the console’s chart, so treat it as a shape.week of Oct 12, 2026
• 78%of 287 AI-answer appearances went to five guides about running Claude Code. The homepage had 5 of 287.three months to Oct 23, 2026
• 11% / under 1%the share of impressions that become clicks: pages with my name, then the guides doing the work. The three guides with the most impressions earned seven clicks between them in three months.three months to Oct 23, 2026
• 63 · 5 · 0 · 2 · 1the Bing baseline: pages indexed, impressions, clicks, Copilot citations, other websites linking to mine.Sep 12, 2026
• 28real links from other websites earned by my old site in twelve years. Its console said 437; 435 were redirect hops from my own old domain.Sep 13, 2026

03 · My own handMy sentences, by hand and with AI in the loop

Measured November 2026 across about 50,000 words I wrote by hand and everything I made with the tool since. Source: Measure Your Writing Against Your Own Hand, published November 9. Try it on your own writing with the free tool.

• 19% → 5%sentences of thirty words or more: my personal essays by hand, then my weekly letters with the tool in the loop.Nov 2026
• 8% → 29%sentences of five words or fewer, the same two piles.Nov 2026
• 0.2 → 3.7the reversal (“It isn’t X. It’s Y.”) per thousand words: personal essays by hand, then LinkedIn posts in 2026 with the tool drafting.Nov 2026
• 0%of the sentences in one unedited dictation were five words or fewer, and 11% ran past thirty. Talking, I sound like my own hand.Nov 2026

04 · Reader votesWhat readers said when I asked

One click from the Sunday essay or an Instagram story. Tiny samples, so read them as a show of hands in one room.

— Joe