OpenSees Cloud
OpenSees AMI
2025 In Review
31 Dec 2025 - Michael H. Scott
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.
From November 6 to December 27, there was a huge jump in daily views and visitors, almost all without a referral. The most logical explanation for this 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 well-aging 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.
I work on problems related to modeling and nonlinear structural analysis. If these problems are relevant to a current professional project, feel free to reach out.