A Wave of Unexplained Bot Traffic Is Sweeping the Web
Many people suspect that these bots are part of an AI company's effort to collect training data from websites. In 2025, AI bots responsible for a significant part of the total web trafficwho crawl the Internet for text and other information to feed to data hungry major language models.
But there are some important differences between these Chinese bots and other AI bots. First, there are simply a lot more of them. King says on his website that traffic from China and Singapore accounts for 22 percent of total traffic, while all other AI bots combine for less than 10 percent.
Most leading AI companies clearly identify their bots to website operators, which also makes them easier to block. The frontier AI labs are “not that interested in evading” bot-blocking rules, says Brent Maynard, senior director of security technology and strategy at internet infrastructure company Akamai. He says AI companies usually only start trying to disguise their bots after a website closes the front door. This wave of Chinese bots, however, disguised themselves as normal human users from the beginning, and they even bypassed common bot-blocking rules, several website owners told WIRED.
Beyond AI companies, there are other companies encouraged to scrape the internet, including search crawlers and intelligence gathering companies.
Rising costs and distorted data
The good news, at least for now, is that the bots don't seem to have any explicit malicious intent. They have not been publicly associated with cyber attacks 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 the bots are scanning copyrighted material without permission. Others say the surge has forced them to pay more for bandwidth as bot traffic displaces human users, or to invest in more sophisticated prevention tools. The visits also skew traffic analytics, distorting reports about who is actually visiting their sites.
But the biggest impacts are felt by people who earn income by attracting advertisement clicks on their websites. “This is ruining my AdSense strategies,” says Quintero, the paranormal blog owner, “because they say [your website is] visited only by bots, so your content is not something valuable to the viewer. As a result, websites like his may be seen as less desirable to advertisers and be penalized by Google.
Makeshift Solutions
Many people have complained about the China AI bot problem in online support channels in recent months, or sent messages about it directly to their web hosting providers. But so far there are only a few concrete answers.
Contacted by WIRED, WordPress acknowledged that it has seen reports in recent months that some of its sites are experiencing increased traffic from suspected AI bots or scrapers. “WordPress websites have always had a great structure that makes them easy to find and indexed by search engines. These same features make them easy to crawl [by] AI too,” the company said in an unsigned email. Google, Cloudflare and Squarespace did not respond to requests for comment.
