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 web pages. In 2025, AI bots accounted for a significant portion of overall web traffic, which crawl the internet for text and other information to feed to data-hungry large language models.

But there are some key differences between these Chinese bots and other AI bots. First, there’s simply way more of them. King says on his website that the traffic from China and Singapore accounts for 22 percent of overall traffic, while all other AI bots account for less than 10 percent combined.

Most leading AI companies clearly identify their bots to website operators, which also makes them easier to block. The frontier AI labs are “not as interested in evading” bot-blocking rules, says Brent Maynard, senior director of security technology and strategy at the internet infrastructure company Akamai. He says AI companies usually only start trying to disguise their bots after a website shuts the front door. This wave of Chinese bots, however, disguised themselves as normal human users from the start, and they have even bypassed common bot-blocking rules, several website owners told WIRED.

Beyond AI companies, there are other businesses incentivized 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 an explicitly malicious purpose. They haven’t been publicly connected to any cyberattack and don’t seem to be scanning for vulnerabilities. But the lack of a clear motive also adds to the confusion.

Some website owners are worried that the bots are scanning 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. 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 revenue from attracting ad clicks on their websites. “This is destroying my AdSense strategies,” says Quintero, the paranormal blog owner, “because they are saying [your website is] only visited by bots, so your content is not something that is valuable to the viewer.” As a result, websites like his may be seen as less desirable to advertisers and penalized by Google.

Makeshift Solutions

Many people have complained about the China AI bot problem in 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 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 be indexed by search engines. Those same capabilities make them easily crawled [by] AI as well,” the company said in an unsigned email. Google, Cloudflare, and Squarespace did not respond to requests for comment.