> Why not just get this info from the HTTP server?

This is explained in the blog post:

> There's always the option of just parsing server logs, which gives a rough indication of the kinds of traffic accessing the server. Unfortunately all server traffic is generally seen as equal. Technically bots "should" have a user-agent that identifies them as a bot, but few identify that since they're trying to scrape information as a "person" using a browser. In essence, just using server logs for analytics gives a skewed perspective to traffic since a lot of it are search-engine crawlers and scrapers (and now GPT-based parsers).

Don't bots now load an entire browser including simulated user interaction, to the point where there's no difference?

Not for the most part, it's still very expensive. Even if, they don't simulate mouse movement.

All bots

Hard if you run serverless

There's still a server somewhere and it can log URLs and IPs.

Of course. But you can't access it. You can't get logs for static sites on Cloudflare Pages.

And even if there are many servers (a CDN or distributed caching) you can collect and merge these.

Tell me how to collect the logs for static sites on Cloudflare Pages (not functions. The Pages sites)

Cloudflare Pages are running on servers. These servers (can, quite certainly will) have logs.

That you cannot access the logs because you don't own the servers doesn't mean there aren't any servers that have logs.

Yes, no one has argued that Cloudflare Pages arent using servers. But it is "hard" to track using logs if you are a cloudflare customers. Guess only way would be to hack into cloudflare itself and access my logs that way. But that is "hard" (because yes theoretically it is possible i know). And not a realistic alternative.

> Guess only way would be to hack into cloudflare itself and access my logs that way.

No. The most obvious way is to reassess running on servers/services that you don't own, and which don't offer features you need.

I think people are trying to say there is no such thing as "serverless", be more specific

Not if it's static generated html/css.

And the real benefit of this trick is separating users from bots.

Statically generated HTML+CSS doesn't mean a server is not required, learn basic networking.

Huh? You can get logs just fine from your ALB's and API Gateways.