A Surge of Mysterious Bot Activity Is Flooding the Internet

Many individuals believe that these bots are part of an AI company’s strategy to gather training data from online content. In 2025, AI bots represented a substantial share of overall web traffic, scouring the internet for text and other resources to supply large language models with the data they require.

However, there are notable differences between these Chinese bots and other AI bots. Firstly, there are simply far more of them. King mentions on his site that traffic from China and Singapore constitutes 22 percent of total traffic, while all other AI bots collectively account for less than 10 percent.

Leading AI firms typically identify their bots to website operators, making them easier to block. The top AI labs are “less focused on circumventing” bot-blocking measures, according to Brent Maynard, senior director of security technology and strategy at the internet infrastructure firm Akamai. He states that AI companies generally begin trying to conceal their bots only after a website has implemented stringent blocking. In contrast, this influx of Chinese bots has masqueraded as ordinary users from the outset, successfully evading common bot-blocking protocols, as reported by several website owners to WIRED.

Beyond AI companies, various other enterprises are motivated to scrape internet data, including search crawlers and intelligence-gathering firms.

Rising Costs and Distorted Data

The encouraging news, for the moment, is that these bots do not appear to serve an overtly malicious intent. They haven’t been formally linked to any cyberattacks and seem not to be on the lookout for vulnerabilities. Yet the absence of a defined motive contributes to overall ambiguity.

Some website owners express concerns that the bots are harvesting copyrighted content without authorization. Others report that the influx has led to increased costs for bandwidth, as bot traffic overwhelms human visitors, forcing them to invest in more advanced prevention solutions. Such visits also skew traffic analytics, misrepresenting actual visitor demographics.

The most significant effects are felt by those who generate income from ad clicks on their websites. “This is disrupting my AdSense strategies,” states Quintero, the owner of a paranormal blog, “because it indicates [your website is] predominantly visited by bots, suggesting that your content lacks value for viewers.” Consequently, websites like his may be perceived as less appealing to advertisers and subsequently penalized by Google.

Makeshift Solutions

In recent months, numerous individuals have voiced their concerns regarding the China AI bot issue in online support forums or have contacted their web-hosting services directly. Yet, there are still few tangible solutions available.

When approached by WIRED, WordPress acknowledged that it has received reports in recent months about some of its sites encountering increased traffic from suspected AI bots or scrapers. “WordPress websites have always been structured in a way that facilitates their discovery and indexing by search engines. Those same features also make them vulnerable to being crawled [by] AI,” the company stated in an unsigned email. Google, Cloudflare, and Squarespace did not respond to requests for comment.