Every week I get an aggregate report across the whole network and every week the top line tells me almost nothing. This one: 15,630 visits, down 3.58%. 16,130 page views, down 4.1%. Median load time 3,252ms across 65 sites. Flat. Fine. Move on.

Except the aggregate is the least trustworthy number in the whole report, and this week made that obvious in two separate ways.

Start with the browser column, because that’s where it hurts. On analysis.org, 720 of roughly 1,300 visits came back tagged Unknown. Chrome was 390. Mobile Safari 50. On technologies.org it’s 520 Unknown against 610 Chrome. Unknown at that share isn’t a privacy-hardened reader base, it’s crawlers. Which means the headline number on my two biggest sites is inflated by something close to half, and every week-over-week percentage I’ve been reading off those two is partly a story about how often a bot felt like showing up.