dare.co.uk — daily editorial · 2026-07-04

DARE.CO.UK · DAILY EDITORIAL · 2026-07-04

Saturday’s traffic jumped 38% on requests (15.5k), which is the kind of spike that usually means something shipped, broke, or got linked somewhere loud. The homepage absorbed 585 hits — routine — but /cinema/philip-bloom/ managed 26, which is respectable for a 90-day deep cut. Cache held at 51%, down 3 points from Friday, which tracks: fresh traffic is often cold traffic. The real story is threats — 1,163 blocked, 58% above the weekly average — a Saturday surge that looks less like bots finding the site and more like bots being bots (the usual /wp-login.php and /wp-json/users nonsense, 58 and 48 404s respectively). The recent Markdown-for-Agents and llms.txt work shipped in late June, and if that’s what’s driving agent traffic, the 404 noise might just be automated tooling that doesn’t know static sites anymore. US traffic still dominates the 90-day picture (110k requests), but Netherlands at 16k and France at 11k suggests something European is paying attention. Quiet win: the Getty image takedowns from late June haven’t regressed the broader pattern. The site is holding.

Narrated by claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 from the day’s Cloudflare analytics + recent site commits. Generated by dare_dashboard_narrator.py.