They're heee-re

Your website is busy - and most of what's visiting is not human.

A significant portion of every website's monthly traffic is bots: automated programs that crawl the internet constantly, quietly hitting your pages repeatedly.

Some are completely benign; Google's bot is how your studio shows up in search results. Bing's does the same thing. Without those, you'd be invisible online.

But bots aren't just search engines. Bots check for broken links, bots catalog prices. Bots probe websites looking for outdated software to exploit — meaning they scan for known security weaknesses and use them to break in. Bots are sent by social platforms to preview links when someone shares your URL. AI bots, which are newer, crawl content to train language models or power AI search results.

Why does this matter?

What the bots are doing or not doing tells you about the health of your site. For example, a broken link being crawled repeatedly means something that used to exist on your site is gone, and nothing has replaced it. Every one of those crawls is a missed opportunity to send someone (or something) somewhere useful.

A spike in probe activity from unfamiliar sources can signal that your software needs updating. Pages that aren't getting crawled may not be indexed — meaning potential customers can't find them in search, even when your content matches exactly what they're looking for.

Old URLs that throw errors will hurt your SEO over time. You won't notice it in your site's daily traffic right away, but it compounds.

The bot your studio wants visiting

AI bots are becoming increasingly more important.

When someone asks ChatGPT, Google's AI Overview, or another AI assistant for a recommendation — "where can I do pottery painting near me," "fun things to do with kids in [your city]" — the answer those tools give is based on content they've crawled from the web.

If your site is being crawled regularly by AI bots, that's a good sign. It means your content is being read and potentially used to answer real questions from real people who never even visited your site directly.

That's a new kind of visibility, and it's only going to continue to mean A LOT for people finding your studio.

Email? Yes, email, too

Bot activity doesn't stop at your website. Your email list has its own version of this story.

When you send an email, some of the "opens" you see in your reporting are actually automated — security scanners and email clients that pre-load messages to check for malicious content. That's why open rates, while useful, aren't the whole story.

What tells you more: click rates, bounce rates, and long-term trends.

Bounce rates creeping up is a list-health signal. It means you're sending to addresses that no longer exist, and over time that damages your sender reputation — the invisible score that determines whether your emails land in inboxes or spam folders.

A campaign with an unusually high open rate is worth documenting. Something about it worked — the subject line, the timing, the topic — and if nobody notes it, you just got lucky once instead of building on something real.

The takeaway

Your website and your email list are doing things that have nothing to do with whether you posted today or how your last event went. There's a whole layer of activity underneath the surface that affects your SEO, your visibility, your deliverability, and ultimately how easy it is for customers to find you.

You don't have to become a data analyst. But knowing this layer exists — and that someone should be paying attention to it — is the first step to making sure your digital presence is working as hard as it can for your studio.

There's more!

A few things we caught in a single month of monitoring:

• a 6× spike in probe activity worth flagging to the web host

• a broken Facebook link being hit 45 times — going nowhere

• an email campaign that hit a 54.9% open rate, nearly double the industry average

None of it visible without someone watching the data.

Want to know what's happening on your Wix site? Email me, Hillary@thecreativeretailer.com