A wave of unexplained bot traffic is sweeping the web

Many people suspect that these bots are part of the AI ​​company’s efforts to collect training data from web pages. In 2025, artificial intelligence robots It represents a large portion of total web trafficwhich crawl the Internet in search of text and other information to feed to data-hungry users Large linguistic models.

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

Most leading AI companies clearly identify their bots to website operators, which also makes it easier to block them. Frontier AI labs are “not interested in evading” botnet ban rules, says Brent Maynard, senior director of security technology and strategy at internet infrastructure company Akamai. He says AI companies typically start trying to hide their bots only after a website closes the front door. This wave of Chinese bots, however, masqueraded as ordinary human users from the beginning, even bypassing common bot ban rules, several website owners told WIRED.

Beyond AI companies, there are other companies being incentivized to hack the Internet, including search crawlers and intelligence gathering companies.

High costs and distorted data

The good news, at least for now, is that the bots don’t appear to have a clearly malicious purpose. They have not been publicly linked to any cyberattack 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 about bots scanning copyrighted material without permission. Others say the boom has forced them to pay more for bandwidth, as bot traffic crowds out human users, or to invest in more sophisticated security tools. The visits also skew traffic analytics, distorting reports about who actually visits their sites.

But the biggest impacts are felt by people who get revenue from driving clicks on ads on their websites. “This is ruining my AdSense strategies, because they say (your website) is only visited by bots, so your content is not something valuable to the viewer,” says Quintero, the blogger extraordinaire. As a result, websites similar to his may be seen as less desirable by advertisers and penalized by Google.

Temporary solutions

Many people have complained about the Chinese AI bot issue 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.

In contact with WIRED, WordPress acknowledged that it has seen reports in recent months that some of its sites are seeing an increase in traffic from AI bots or suspected scrapers. “WordPress websites have always had a great structure that makes them easy to find and indexed by search engines. These same capabilities make them easy to crawl (by) AI as well,” the company said in an unsigned email. Google, Cloudflare, and Squarespace did not respond to requests for comment.