A Wave of Unexplained Bot Traffic Is Sweeping the Web

6 hours ago

Alejandro Quintero's paranormal website saw a sudden surge in traffic from China and Singapore, later identified as bot activity.
The bot traffic originated primarily from Lanzhou, China, and Singapore, with visitors spending 0 seconds on pages and showing no interaction.
Multiple website operators worldwide, including US government sites, reported similar bot influxes, skewing analytics.
The bots are suspected to be linked to AI companies scraping web data for training models, though their exact origin remains unclear.
Lanzhou, a non-tech hub, was flagged as the source, but traffic may be routed through Chinese cloud providers like Tencent, Alibaba, and Huawei.
Unlike typical AI bots, these Chinese bots disguise themselves as human users and bypass common blocking measures.
The bot surge has increased bandwidth costs, distorted analytics, and hurt ad revenue for affected websites.
Website owners have resorted to blocking specific IP ranges and ASNs to mitigate the bot traffic, with mixed success.
The lack of a clear malicious intent adds to the confusion, though concerns about unauthorized data scraping persist.
As AI tools proliferate, combating bot traffic is becoming a growing challenge for website operators globally.

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