Why Am I Now Getting Google Analytics Ads?

Seriously.

Email received as of September 8, 2026.

I don't get it.

I've not had a blip of email from Google Analytics --aside from the rare Google Notifications email-- in ages, and now within the past couple of weeks I've begun getting semi-regular spam from Google itself.

Email received as of September 3, 2026.

This is the sort of thing that appears when a post --typically a Meme Monday-- gets an inordinate amount of clicks. Let's be real here: those clicks are most likely web crawlers and LLM bots and they just happened upon this blog. It's not as if I suddenly gained 10k readers or something. Yes, Google Analytics shows a bit of a boost at the beginning of September, but like I said, it looks like it's going to be pretty temporary:

Screencap of Google Analytics' active user
trend for the past 90 days as of September 14, 2026.

As you can see, it's already reverting to the mean, so I'm not exactly shocked here. Still, why all the sudden spam from Google Analytics like the email I led with, anyway?

I figure it has to be that the results of two weeks worth of 80k+ users has something to do with it, and that Google's algorithm has decided I'm worth "investing" in.

I did hop on the Google Search Console just to see if that translated into Google finally acknowledging that PC exists as a Blogger blog, but...

Google Search Console Indexing Chart
as of September 14, 2026.

Google still hasn't indexed anything from PC lately. However, note the sudden spike on August 10, 2026. I went from 1031 to 2646 pages "Not Indexed". I'm not sure what to make about that, but there was one change to the environment: 

Google Search Console Sitemap Info
as of September 14, 2026.

I periodically re-submit the sitemap.xml that Blogger automatically generates, just to see if one part of the vast Google Empire can interact with another. And whaddya know, this time it actually read the XML file! It may not have all of the pages on PC discovered, but it's a lot better than what I have had in the past:

Google Search Console as of January 17, 2026.

We'll see if anything comes of all this rigamarole, but I'm still confused as to the big question: Why now?

The only reasonable explanation is that PC suddenly became big enough to register, but that just doesn't feel right to me. I'm more likely to believe that the wheels of Google just suddenly aligned and spat out some weird results. I'm not about to ascribe the sudden interest to anything I did, since I've been doing the same thing for years. 

So... Thank you, LLM bots... I guess...

***

There has been one other weird development that I wanted to mention and see if anybody else has noticed:

PC Front Page as of
September 14, 2026.

It may not look that interesting to you, but I noticed right before I left this past weekend that Bhagpuss of Inventory Full hadn't put out a new post in several days. Given that Bhagpuss is quite prolific, I found that quite odd. At first I thought "Well, he probably went on vacation," but when I looked on his blog he quite obviously had more recent posts:

Inventory Full's front page as of September 14, 2026.

I thought that maybe there was a problem with his feed, but then I noticed that all of the blogs on my Front Page that use Blogger hadn't been updated in over a week as well (see above). 

And yes, I did check several of them, so I'd need not bore you with extra screencaps.

So yeah, there's an issue with Blogger where the feed isn't getting updated. Is that happening with anybody else?