A Wave of Unexplained Bot Traffic Is Sweeping the Web
Many people suspect that these bots are part of an AI company’s efforts to collect training data from web pages. By 2025, AI bots accounted for a significant portion of overall web traffic, scouring the internet for text and other information to power large, data-intensive language models.
But there are key differences between these Chinese robots and other AI robots. First, there are simply a lot more of them. King says on its website that traffic from China and Singapore makes up 22% of overall traffic, while all other AI bots make up less than 10% combined.
Most major AI companies clearly identify their bots to website operators, which also makes it easier to block them. Border AI labs are “not as interested in circumventing” bot-blocking rules, says Brent Maynard, senior director of technology and security strategy at internet infrastructure company Akamai. He says AI companies usually only start trying to hide their bots after a website closes the front door. However, this wave of Chinese bots disguised themselves as normal human users from the start, and they even circumvented common bot-blocking rules, several website owners told WIRED.
Beyond AI companies, there are other companies with an incentive to scrape the Internet, including search bots and intelligence-gathering companies.
Rising costs and distorted data
The good news, at least for now, is that the bots do not appear to have any explicitly malicious goals. They have not been publicly associated with any cyberattacks and do not appear to be scanning for vulnerabilities. But the lack of a clear motive also adds to the confusion.
Some website owners are concerned that bots will crawl copyrighted material without permission. Others say the surge has forced them to pay more for bandwidth as bot traffic crowds out human users, or to invest in more sophisticated prevention tools. Visits also skew traffic analytics, skewing reporting on who is actually visiting their sites.
But the biggest impacts are felt by people who earn revenue by attracting ad clicks to their websites. “It destroys my AdSense strategies,” says Quintero, the owner of the paranormal blog, “because they say [your website is] only visited by bots, so your content has no value to the viewer. As a result, websites like his may be seen as less attractive to advertisers and penalized by Google.
Makeshift solutions
Many people have complained about the Chinese AI bot issue on online support channels over the past few months, or sent messages about it directly to their web hosting providers. But so far, there are still few concrete answers.
Contacted by WIRED, WordPress acknowledged seeing reports in recent months that some of its sites were experiencing an increase in traffic from suspected AI bots or scrapers. “WordPress websites have always had a great structure that makes them easy to find and index by search engines. These same capabilities make them easy to crawl. [by] So does AI,” the company said in an unsigned email. Google, Cloudflare and Squarespace did not respond to requests for comment.
