They didn't have any clue. Back in 2005 personal data and access logs and analytics was considered a chore, you'd delegate the annoyance of log rotation to some sys admin or helpdesk intern and generally purge all data as quickly as possible because storage was expensive.

Occasionally someone would make a cool tool that parsed htaccess logs and gave you a neat visualization or something, but that was it. Literally nobody tracked anything on the internet.

It almost seems like fiction when I type it out now.