2025 In Review

My annual review of blog stats and traffic might feel obligatory, but 2025 shows 2026 will likely ring in a new normal.

Word Count

The sum of all keys hit in 2025:

• 45 posts
• 26,253 words
• 583 words per post

Compared to 2023 and 2024, the number of posts and words decreased, but the density increased. This slight change in posting behavior is mostly driven by my participation in November’s ZeroPoMo instead of NaBloPoMo, where one blog post a day tends to add more filler than substance.

Traffic

Traffic in 2025:

• 93,072 views
• 31,208 visitors
• 2.98 views per visitor

This year showed a noticeable jump in the number of views and visitors compared to previous years.

From November 6 to December 27, there was a sharp, sustained increase in daily views and visitors, almost all without a referral. The most logical explanation for this traffic step function is bots, crawlers, and scrapers indexing content for AI.

Although I did briefly consider a poison pill, I soon realized the best way to outrun the bots is to keep producing high quality content.

Also, I am flattered that someone is going to build an OpenSees AI something from my blog posts. I agree, they should use my voice and judgment as scaffolding.

Top Posts

Views in 2025 to any post:

• Gimme All Your Damping, All Your Mass and Stiffness Too – 3930 views
• Be Careful with Modal Damping – 1675 views
• How to Record Fiber Response – 1352 views
• The Basics of Frame Element Localization – 1010 views
• Parameter Updates in the Loop – 957 views

The view counts are pretty high due to the late-year bot activity. At least the bots were discerning and hit the evergreen content.

Top Countries

Views in 2025:

• China – 25,921 views
• United States – 17,375 views
• Italy – 4007 views
• Canada – 3374 views
• India – 3295 views

Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Turkey, and Japan round out the top 10.

Top Referrers

From somewhere else to the blog in 2025:

• Search engines – 18,498 referrals
  About 90% of the referrals are from Google and most of the rest are from Bing
• Facebook – 1281 referrals
  Mostly from the OpenSees Facebook group
• terje.civil.ubc.ca – 358 referrals
  Prof. Terje Haukaas’s toolbox of course notes, examples, and Python code for finite element and structural reliability analysis
• ChatGPT – 322 referrals
  Each referral is someone clicking on a source/citation link in the AI-generated response
• opensees.berkeley.edu – 313 referrals
  Home of the OpenSees wiki and (what’s left of) the message board

With the exception of ChatGPT, which is a newcomer to the Top Referrers list, year-over-year referrals are generally down from last year, consistent with the general decline in search engine referrals across the internet.

Top Clicks

From the blog to somewhere else in 2025:

• github.com – 765 clicks
  Links to PRs and Issues in the OpenSees GitHub repository
• doi.org – 640 clicks
  Links to journal articles
• opensees.berkeley.edu – 443 clicks
  Links to wiki documentation
• openseespydoc.readthedocs.io – 266 clicks
  Links to OpenSeesPy documentation
• secondsees.com – 185 clicks
  Links to OpenSees Cloud and OpenSees AMI usage instructions

No year-over-year change in the members or ordering of this list, but the number of clicks is generally down from last year.

Will Write for Bots in 2026

And humans too, of course. The bots are going to keep reading. I hope you do too.