Blogger and "Total Pageviews" ~ A Mystery

     Okay, so since I posted "A Hidden Road" on pages here on my blog (following my somewhat questionable decision to delete it from AO3 because of one truly upsetting comment), I've been paying more attention to the "Total Pageviews" number when you visit the blog (or, in my case, hit the "Preview" button from a post or page in the editor).

    This is because in that time it's gone up, a lot, while the number of views for the individual posts and pages have not gone up much at all.

    Meager photographic proof:

    (Wow, that partial screencap turned out to be enormous.)  This was what it said at 8:05 yesterday morning.

    This is what it said at 7:30 this morning.  (And as of about two minutes ago, that number had gone up to 7,834.)

    However, if I just add up the number of visits to the pages and posts, the total is only 1,435.  (Yes, I actually went through and added them all up.)

    Before I added the fic (and a link to the blog in my profile on AO3, in the hopes that someone would click on my profile, wondering where my fic had gone, and then follow the link to find it here, which might have happened once, but I'm not sure about that (even if it did, they didn't finish reading it, because the pages that had gained a view stopped a third of the way through)) that "Total Pageviews" number was somewhere in either the high 4,000s or the low 5,000s.  I think the latter, but I'm not positive.

    So where the heck did all those extra views come from, when most of them don't represent a view of a post?  (Especially considering that when I click "view post" from the post management screen, that makes the post's view counter go up one, so a lot of the 1,435 are actually me.  (Though it sounds like maybe I can turn that off, which would be sweet.  I need to look into that as soon as I'm done with this post.))

    Now, admittedly, just following the link to the blog will take you to a landing page that shows the full posts without counting on any of their view numbers, so some of that may be people clicking through from the Insecure Writer's Support Group and then not clicking on any individual posts, and the spike could (conceivably?) be something the whole IWSG has been experiencing, with some bot going through all the links on the IWSG's page, but then not leaving comments, or not leaving them on my particular blog because the landing page doesn't have a comment form, and the fact that it happened since adding the fic is coincidental.

    The only other theory I have is that maybe when a search engine grazes the page, that counts as a pageview even if the person who ran the search didn't actually visit the blog.  Given that I've been posting more and more about MDZS (which is very popular worldwide), that seems possible?  But it's weird to imagine that Blogger counts a search engine as a pageview.

    Obviously, none of this actually matters, since worrying about how many views my blog has gotten is 100% empty vanity (well, maybe not "vanity" exactly, but something akin to it) but I have to admit that it's weirding me out that my total numbers have gone up so much so fast (it's been like a month and a half, maybe?) compared to how much they went up in the preceding two and a half years.

    Anyway, that was just sort of sitting on my brain and bothering me, so I wanted to let it out.

    I may try futzing around with the settings to see if I can make it so the total only goes up in accordance with the posts and pages, but I'm not sure if that's possible.

    EDIT:  I just had a look at my stats page (lol, should have done that first!) and I can confirm from what I saw there that it is definitely a bot.  (Surprisingly, according to those numbers, the numbers shown on screen should actually be higher, which suggests that Blogger started cottoning on to it being a bot and stopped counting it after a while.)  The bot is using Mobile Safari on an Android device (weird in and of itself, considering Safari is the Apple browser!) and coming out of one particular country, but I feel like I'd be insulting the country if I said which one, so I won't.  The bot accounted for almost 5.5k pageviews.  There's also the possibility of a bot elsewhere for the "Other" views that were around 1.7k pageviews.  The ones that actually seem to be genuine views account for about 500 of the new views over the last month.  In itself that's already an unrealistically high number, imho, but not quite as shockingly so.
    (This makes me very glad I've never attempted to monetize my blog, because I would totally feel like a thief if I was getting paid because some bot is glitching out and loading my blog repeatedly.)